Long-term land use and biodiversity change in the UK: a view from the archaeological record

Online Winter Lecture via Zoom

7.30pm

Prof. Ralph Fyfe, Associate Dean (Research) and Professor of Geospatial Information, Faculty of Science and Engineering, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Plymouth

We are currently living through a biodiversity crisis, presented in both the popular media and the science community.  Whilst there is no doubt that this crisis represents a clear and present danger, there have been few attempts to place the trends that we see today in their longer-term context, and patterns are described from ecological observations covering at best the last ~50 years.  Current initiatives to reverse trends in biodiversity loss focus on restoration of natural situations (e.g. through rewilding efforts). All this is laudable.  What is less clear is what the natural situation actually was, and how, and when, people shifted biodiversity from those natural baselines.  Did the start of agriculture in the Neolithic reduce biodiversity?  When was maximum biodiversity in the past?  Did different forms of past agrarian land use result in different patterns of diversity?  This talk will present initial results from the Biodiversity and Land-Use Change in the British Isles project, which brings together fossil pollen, plant macrofossils and ancient insect remains from archaeological, and natural, contexts, to start addressing these fundamental questions.  These three lines of evidence are integrated to explore past changes in land-use (via the archaeobotanical record), and land-cover (via the pollen record) over the past 8000 years, combined with indications of long-term population change.  The talk will show reconstructions of biodiversity patterns from insect remains, and pollen records, from the whole of the UK, and the results of archaeobotanical data compilation from southeast England in particular.