Other language confidence: 0.9891197831969085
Land use is a key driver of global environmental change. Unless major shifts in consumptive behaviours occur, land-based production will have to increase drastically to meet future demands for food and other commodities. One approach to better understand the drivers and impacts of agricultural intensification is the identification of global, archetypical patterns of land systems. Current approaches focus on broad-scale representations of dominant land cover with limited consideration of land-use intensity. In this study, we derived a new global representation of land systems based on more than 30 high-resolution datasets on land-use intensity, environmental conditions and socioeconomic indicators. Using a self-organizing map algorithm, we identified and mapped twelve archetypes of land systems for the year 2005. Our analysis reveals similarities in land systems across the globe but the diverse pattern at sub-national scales implies that there are no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solutions to sustainable land management. Our results help to identify generic patterns of land pressures and environmental threats and provide means to target regionalized strategies to cope with the challenges of global change. Mapping global archetypes of land systems represents a first step towards better understanding the global patterns of human–environment interactions and the environmental and social outcomes of land system dynamics.
The focus of the project is to improve our understanding of human-environment interactions in Southern Alpine regions by detecting biogeochemical markers in soils to reconstruct the development of a landscape that was shaped by humans since millennia. Until now, information about the chronological and spatial extent of changes from a natural to a human-dominated landscape, especially in the Southern Alpine regions, has been scarce. The results of our investigation would allow us to understand where and when (pre)historic settlers installed their agricultural land. The aims are (1) to adapt, evaluate and improve the applied methods so that we can use biogeochemical markers retained in soil material (2) to quantify the anthropogenic influence and to determine the processes of human impact on the environment such as manuring and burning, and (3) to investigate the spatial extension and chronology of agricultural sites (off-site-archaeology) in the surroundings of a Bronze Age settlement in Airolo-Madrano (e.g. agricultural terraces). The processes of human impact, or the agricultural techniques used by the settlers will be documented by the analysed marker substances and radiocarbon dating.