Land Use and Ecological Change: A 12,000-Year History

Abstract

Human use of land has been transforming Earth's ecology for millennia. From hunting and foraging to burning the land to farming to industrial agriculture, increasingly intensive human use of land has reshaped global patterns of biodiversity, ecosystems, landscapes, and climate. This review examines recent evidence from archaeology, paleoecology, environmental history, and model-based reconstructions that reveal a planet largely transformed by land use over more than 10,000 years. Although land use has always sustained human societies, its ecological consequences are diverse and sometimes opposing, both degrading and enriching soils, shrinking wild habitats and shaping novel ones, causing extinctions of some species while propagating and domesticating others, and both emitting and absorbing the greenhouse gases that cause global climate change. By transforming Earth's ecology, land use has literally paved the way for the Anthropocene. Now, a better future depends on land use strategies that can effectively sustain people together with the rest of terrestrial nature on Earth's limited land.

Localized Native American impacts on past forest composition across a regional extent in north‐eastern United States

“…Understanding the effects of Native American land use on past landscapes is valuable across varied disciplines and informs modern land management decisions. This research contributes to a growing body of literature on human land use, niche construction and its effect on biodiversity and ecosystems globally over millennia (Boivin et al, 2016;Ellis, 2021). It helps understand the possible role of past Native American burning in the maintenance of oak forests of the eastern United States, which have experienced a transition from primarily fire-tolerant to fire-sensitive species over the 20th and 21st centuries (McEwan et al, 2011;Nowacki & Abrams, 2008).…”

Spatiotemporal Patterns in and Key Influences on Cultivated-Land Multi-Functionality in Northeast China’s Black-Soil Region

“…The ecological utilization of cultivated land in breadbaskets needs to be improved and the long-term sustainable utilization of cultivated land needs to be promoted. Ecological issues with cultivated land are closely related to the presence of people, compared with other natural resources, because of the long history of human settlement around areas of cultivation [50]. People benefit directly from the positive effects of cultivation, such as environmental improvement and biodiversity, but there are also negative effects, such as water pollution and straw-burning pollution [51].…”

Life Cycle Assessment on Agricultural Production: A Mini Review on Methodology, Application, and Challenges

“…Agricultural land resources cover ~37.6% of the world’s land area and have been the foundation of human existence for centuries, as well as the basis for shaping cultural differences, the ecosystem balance and spatial order [ 38 ]. However, the misuse of land has resulted in a series of ecological and environmental problems, such as the degradation of production capabilities, the destruction of land structure and function, and the devastation of the environment [ 38 , 39 ]. Since the 1990s, several methods and tools have been developed for an integrated assessment of the sustainability of agricultural systems and land use [ 40 ] in order to address the complexity of globalized socio-political and economic contexts.…”