LandCover6k

Land-use change may imply land-cover change that will affect climate in different ways.

The goal of PAGES’ LandCover6k Working Group was to use pollen, archaeological and historical data to provide information on past land cover and land use change that can be used to evaluate and improve Anthropogenic Land-Cover Change (ALCC) scenarios for palaeoclimate modelling and the study of land-use as a climate forcing.

The latter will improve our understanding of past land cover-climate interactions and the effect of current and future land-use change on tomorrow’s climate.

Activities

LandCover6k consisted of four activities:

- Pollen-based land-cover reconstructions (Land Cover, LC).
Coordinator: Marie-José Gaillard.
- Archaeology/History land-use reconstructions (Land Use, LU).
Coordinators: Kathy Morrison, Marco Madella, Nicki Whitehouse.
- Anthropogenic Land-Cover Change (ALCC, HYDE-KK) modeling.
Coordinators: Kees Klein Goldewijk, Jed O. Kaplan.
- Co-design of climate model experiments with the PMIP Community (Clim).
Coordinators: Sandy Harrison, ECR Kamolphat Atsawawaranunt.

Find out more about the people who worked on LandCover6k here

Access the past LandCover6k meetings here

See the extensive list of LandCover6k products here

LandCover6k and ArchaeoGlobe

LandCover6k and ArchaeoGlobe are two collaborating initiatives that still have to be harmonized. They should not be confused as they do not, for the time being, have the same goals and methods. However, we hope that the two initiatives can be harmonized and merged in the future. Here, we inform on the current differences between the two initiatives. More detailed information can be obtained from the coordinators of the respective initiatives.

The categories LandCover6k and ArchaeoGlobe use to record quantitative data are not the same, as they are collected for different purposes. You are all most welcome to participate in both activities, but read more about the differences between the two activities below to avoid any confusion:

LandCover6k: The goal of LandCover6k was to produce datasets on past land-cover and land-use on continental and global spatial scales that are useful for climate modeling studies on land-use as a climate forcing. The latter was therefore the focus and priority of LandCover6k. It also implies specific methods that are not the same as those used in ArchaeoGlobe.

See above for "Activities" and the associated coordinators.

The LandCover6k LU work packages coordinators were still the same. See the full list of names under the subheading "Work packages" here.

ArchaeoGlobe: The goal of ArchaeoGlobe is to assess levels of knowledge on four land use categories for 10 distinct timeslices of the Holocene - 1. Foraging/hunting/gathering/fishing; 2. Extensive agriculture; 3. Intensive agriculture; 4. Pastoralism.

If you are interested in the ArchaeoGlobe project, contact Erle Ellis eceumbc.edu (ece[at]umbc[dot]edu) and/or Lucas Stephens lucasstesas.upenn.edu (lucasste[at]sas[dot]upenn[dot]edu).

Work packages

NOTE: for more details, contact the coordinators of LandCover6k or the work package’s coordinators (in brackets, below)

a) Pollen-based REVEALS LC 
M.-J. Gaillard, Furong Li, Esther Githumbi, Andria Dawson
- WP-LC1: N America, Canada, Alaska (Jack Williams, ECR Andria Dawson) 
- WP-LC2: Latin and Central America (Sonia Fontana, Thomas Giesecke, William Gosling) 
- WP-LC3: Europe (ECR Esther Githumbi, ECR Jessie Woodbridge, Florence Mazier, Ralph Fyfe)
- WP-LU4: Middle East/Eastern Mediterranean/Central Asia (ECR Esther Githumbi, Sandy Harrison, Ulrike Herzschuh) 
- WP-LC5: Africa (ECR Esther Githumbi, Rob Marchant, Anne-Marie Lézine) 
- WP-LC6: India (ECR Navya Reghu, ECR Parminder Ranhotra, Kryshnamurthi Anupama) 
- WP-LC7: China (ECR Furong Li, ECR Xianyong Cao, Qinghai Xu, Zhuo Zheng) 
- WP-LC8: Japan (Shinya Sugita, Hikaru Takahara) 
- WP-LC9: Australia/Oceania (ECR Michela Mariani, Simon Heberle)

b) Archaeology/history-based LU 
Kathy Morrison, Nicki Whitehouse, Marco Madella
- WP-LU1: N America and Central America (Thomas Foster; Andrew Sluyter) 
- WP-LU2: Latin America (Marco Madella) 
- WP-LU3: Europe (Nicki Whitehouse, Marco Madella, ECR Ferran Antolin, ECR Jan Kolař, Mark Groenhuijzen, Marc Vander Linden, Elena Marinova) 
- WP-LU4: Middle East (Dan Lawrence, Lynn Welton)
- WP-LU5: Africa (Stefania Merlo, ECR Andrea Kay, ECR Colin Courtney Mustaphi, ECR Oliver Boles) 
- WP-LU6: S & SE Asia (Andrew Bauer, Marco Madella, Kathy Morrison) 
- WP-LU7: N & E Asia (ECR Zhao Wanyi, S Xiuqi Fang, S. Alice Yao) 
- WP-LU8: Japan (ECR Enrico Crema)

c) ALCC modeling (WP HYDE-KK): Implementation of a) and b) in HYDE and KK
Kees Klein Goldewijk (HYDE) and Jed O Kaplan (KK)
- WP-HYDE-KK1: Revised HYDE and KK for Europe
- WP-HYDE-KK2: N Hemisphere

d) WP-Clim: Co-design of climate modeling experiments with PMIP and CMIP
Sandy Harrison