Land-use change may imply land-cover change that will affect climate in different ways. The goal of PAGES’ LandCover6k Working Group is to use pollen, archaeological and historical data to provide information on past land cover and land use change that can be used to evaluate and improve Anthropogenic Land-Cover Change (ALCC) scenarios for palaeoclimate modelling and the study of land-use as a climate forcing. The latter will improve our understanding of past land cover-climate interactions and the effect of current and future land-use change on tomorrow’s climate.

Goals of the LC6k working grooup are to provide the climate modeling community with information on past land use consisting of:

1) Pollen-based estimates of land-cover change in quantitative terms, i.e. m2/m2 for plant functional types and three land-cover types, i.e. summer-green and evergreen trees and open land.

2) Archaeology/history-based information on major land-use types and associated quantifiable variables relevant to global processes.

The workgroup webpage in the PAGES site can be found here.

Leaders

Marie-José Gaillard (main coordinator)
Kathy Morrison (LU coordinator)
Marco Madella (LU coordinator)
Nicki Whitehouse (LU coordinator)
Sandy Harrison (Co-design with PMIP)
Emily Hammer (LU global database)
Eduardo Kazuao Tamanaha (LU Latin America)
Andria Dawson (LC N America-Canada)
Esther Githumbi (LC-LU Africa)
Furong Li (LC-LU China)

Access the PAGES Magazine issue on Past Land Use and Land Cover (eds. Gaillard-Lemdahl M-J, Whitehouse N, Madella M, Morrison K & von Gunten L)