Knowledge of the direct role humans have had in changing the landscape requires the perspective of historical and archaeological sources, as well as climatic and ecologic processes, when interpreting paleoecological records. People directly impact land at the local scale and land use decisions are strongly influenced by local sociopolitical priorities that change through time. A complete picture of the potential drivers of past environmental change must include a detailed and integrated analysis of evolving sociopolitical priorities, climatic change and ecological processes. However, there are surprisingly few localities that possess high-quality historical, archeological and high-resolution paleoecologic datasets. We present a high resolution 2700-year pollen record from central Italy and interpret it in relation to archival documents and archaeological data to reconstruct the relationship between changing sociopolitical conditions, and their effect on the landscape. We found that: (1) abrupt environmental change was more closely linked to sociopolitical and demographic transformation than climate change; (2) landscape changes reflected the new sociopolitical priorities and persisted until the sociopolitical conditions shifted; (3) reorganization of new plant communities was very rapid, on the order of decades not centuries; and (4) legacies of forest management adopted by earlier societies continue to influence ecosystem services today.
Modern narratives about changes in the Italian landscape during the early Middle Ages have often been based on assumptions about changing demography; the loss and replacement of complex Roman economic, political and agricultural systems; and broader changes in climate. Using fossil pollen taken from lake cores in the Rieti basin to reconstruct local ecological conditions, close examinations of two discreet periods offer new insights into the changes from small-scale agriculture to silvo-pastoralism that began during the late sixth and early seventh centuries. The deforestation of the ninth century, accompanied by an increase in cultivation, was the result of a long-term accumulation of territory under monastic control. The fact that these changes in the landscape run counter to the prevailing climatic conditions underscores the success of human management of the environment.
In the context of global decline in old-growth forest, historical ecology is a valuable tool to derive insights into vegetation legacies and dynamics and develop new conservation and restoration strategies. In this cross-disciplinary study, we integrate palynology (Lago del Pesce record), history, dendrochronology, and historical and contemporary land cover maps to assess drivers of vegetation change over the last millennium in a Mediterranean mountain forest (Pollino National Park, southern Italy) and discuss implications in conservation ecology. The study site hosts a remnant beech-fir (Fagus sylvatica-Abies alba) mixed forest, a priority habitat for biodiversity conservation in Europe. In the 10th century, the pollen record showed an open environment that was quickly colonized by silver fir when sociopolitical instabilities reduced anthropogenic pressures in mountain forests. The highest forest cover and biomass was reached between the 14th and the 17th centuries following land abandonment due to recurring plague pandemics. This
For much of Italy, the second half of the sixth century was fraught with danger: sporadic warfare, conquest, pandemic, and climate change, in addition to further crises catalyzed by these events such as famine and economic decline. While the impacts of these events are frequently recorded in written sources, sometimes in parallel with the archaeological records, a different story emerges from the fossil pollen records reflecting the ecology of human-managed landscapes. Taking two sites as case studies, a local perspective from Rieti in central Italy and a larger regional synthesis from Sicily, we see records that demonstrate the impact of different human drivers. The arrival of the Lombards and changing economic and administrative systems were the main factors in the transformation of landscapes during this period as local communities continued the management of their agricultural, pastoral, and silvicultural resources.
From the fourteenth through the end of the sixteenth centuries, the primary political, economic, and environmental changes in Italy have been considered to be the impacts of a century of plague following 1348 and the transition from medieval to early modern political and social systems. While at the macro level across the politically divided Italian peninsula these are well attested, in the intermountain basin of the Velino River north of the central Italian city of Rieti, the historical and paleoecological data point to a range of other factors having an eff ect on the changing landscape. As events such as the arrival of the Black Death resonated in the resurgent forest following the steep decline in population, other local activities, such as the city's political realignment with Rome and its interest in controlling the hydrology of the basin as a free commune, equally left their mark on the local ecology of the basin. Ultimately, the historical and paleoecological evidence demonstrates infl uence by continental climate patterns; regional demographic, political, and economic changes; and local priorities in concert.
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