Vegetation changes since the late Middle Ages around Bern, Switzerland
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12200837 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Philip Stevanon (0000-0002-9767-9480, University of Bern, corresponding author), Erika Gobet (0000-0002-3487-8108, University of Bern), Christoph Schwörer (0000-0002-8884-8852, University of Bern), Cilene Rohr (0000-0003-0283-6584, University of Bern), W Tinner (0000-0001-7352-0144, University of Bern) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 753-768 |
| Publication date | 2024-02-20 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Vegetation History and Archaeobotany (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0939-6314 • E-ISSN: 1617-6278 |
| Publisher | Springer Science+Business Media (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s00334-024-00985-x |
| OpenAlex | W4391986726 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 58 |
While the impacts of modern farming and land use practices on climate and biodiversity since 1900 are well-studied in Western and Central Europe, less is known about the preceding transitional period of the 18th and 19th century. By combining information from both natural and historical archives, this study strives to understand the impacts of 18th century agrarian modernisation on Central European ecosystems. Here we present a multi-proxy palaeoecological study from Egelsee (548 m a.s.l., within the city of Bern, Switzerland) spanning the late Middle Ages to the early 20th century. We use pollen, charcoal, dung fungal spores and spheroidal carbonaceous particles (SCPs) as proxies for vegetation and land use changes as well as radiocarbon wiggle matching for the chronology. Our pollen record suggests a shift from cereal cultivation towards grazing from the 16th century onwards, and from the 18th century towards fertilised meadows for animal husbandry. The pollen-inferred decrease of woods since 1700 quantitatively confirms the historically described timber scarcity in the lowlands of Switzerland, while the positive correlation between climate indices and our pollen-inferred cereal production suggests a certain vulnerability of societies to subsistence crises. From the 1850s, urbanisation rapidly altered the vegetation from an open agricultural landscape to a highly urbanised area, leading to a decline of biodiversity towards the present. This study shows that historically well-documented changes in agricultural practices in livestock farming and fodder production, and later urbanisation, can likewise be reconstructed with palaeoecological approaches. Our interdisciplinary approach provides new insights into how agricultural innovations affected vegetation and ecosystems during the past 500 years
Agriculture · Agroforestry · Archaeology · Biodiversity · Biology · Climate change · Geography · Historical ecology · Physical geography · Subsistence agriculture · Urbanization · Vegetation (pathology · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Environmental Science · Geology and Paleoclimatology Research · Tree-ring climate responses · Ecology
Determination of the number of zones in a biostratigraphical sequence
Methods and code for ‘classical’ age-modelling of radiocarbon sequences
Do dung fungal spores make a good proxy for past distribution of large herbivores?
Conservation policy in traditional farming landscapes
Numerical methods in quaternary pollen analysis
Vegetational and agricultural dynamics at Burgäschisee (Swiss Plateau) recorded for 18,700 years by multi-proxy evidence from partly varved sediments
Vertical mobility around the high-alpine Schnidejoch Pass. Indications of Neolithic and Bronze Age pastoralism in the Swiss Alps from paleoecological and archaeological sources
The use of Rarefaction Analysis for Estimating Palynological Richness from Quaternary Pollen-Analytical Data
Minimum count sums for charcoal concentration estimates in pollen slides
Modern pollen – vegetation – plant diversity relationships across large environmental gradients in northern Greece
Size parameters, size-class distribution and area-number relationship of microscopic charcoal
Determining the long-term changes in biodiversity and provisioning services along a transect from Central Europe to the Mediterranean
Economy and environment of Bronze Age settlements – Terramaras – on the Po Plain (Northern Italy)
Late-glacial and Holocene vegetation history and dynamics as shown by pollen and plant macrofossil analyses in annually laminated sediments from Soppensee, central Switzerland
Transitions in European land-management regimes between 1800 and 2010
Recent and Planned Developments of the Program OxCal
Bayesian Analysis of Radiocarbon Dates
Wiggle Matching’ Radiocarbon Dates
Radiocarbon Wiggle Matching on Laminated Sediments Delivers High-Precision Chronologies
The IntCal20 Northern Hemisphere Radiocarbon Age Calibration Curve (0–55 cal kBP)
The Diffusion of Agricultural Innovations in Early Modern England
A New Perspective on Medieval and Early Modern Agriculture
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |