Land cover-climate interactions in the past for the understanding of current and future climate change : the LANDCLIM project

• The LANDCLIM (LAND cover – CLIMate interactions in NW Europe during the Holocene) project has the overall aim to quantify human-induced changes in regional vegetation/land-cover in northwestern and western Europe North of the Alps during the Holocene (the last 11 500 years) with the purpose to evaluate and further refine the dynamic vegetation model LPJGUESS and the regional climate model RCA3, and to assess the possible effects on the climate development of two historical processes, i.e. climate-driven changes in vegetation and human-induced changes in land cover, via the influence of forested versus non-forested land cover on shortwave albedo, energy and water fluxes. Accounting for land surface changes may be particularly important for regional climate modeling, as the biophysical feedbacks operate at this scale. The aims of the LANDCLIM project are achieved by applying a model-data comparison scheme. The REVEALS model is used to estimate land cover from pollen data for 10 plant functional types (PFTs) and 5 time windows of the Holocene - modern time, 200 BP, 500 BP, 3000 BP and 6000 BP. The REVEALS estimates are then compared to the LPJGUESS simulations of potential vegetation and with the ALCC scenarios of Kaplan et al. (KK10) and Klein-Goldewijk et al. (HYDE). The alternative descriptions of past land-cover are then used in the regional climate model RCA3 to study the effect of anthropogenic land-cover on climate. The model-simulated climate is finally compared to palaeoclimate proxies other than pollen. The REVEALS estimates demonstrate that the study region was characterized by larger areas of human-induced openland than pollen percentages suggest, and that these areas were already very large by 3000 BP. The KK10 scenarios were found to be closer to the REVEALS estimates than the HYDE scenarios. LPJGUESS simulates potential climate-induced vegetation. The results from the RCA3 runs at 200 BP and 6000 BP using the LPJGUESS and KK10 land-cover descriptions indicate that past human-induced deforestation did produce a decrease in summer temperatures of >0 - 1.5°C due to biogeophysical processes, and that the degree of decrease differed between regions; the effect of human-induced deforestation on winter temperatures was shown to be more complex. The positive property of forests as CO2 sinks is well known. But afforestation (i.e. planting forest) may also have the opposite effect of warming the climate through biogeophysical processes. Careful studies on land cover-climate interactions are essential to understand the net result of all possible processes related to anthropogenic land-cover change so that relevant landscape management can be implemented for mitigation of climate warming.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Geovetenskap och miljövetenskap -- Klimatforskning (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Earth and Related Environmental Sciences -- Climate Research (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Paleoecology

Paleoekologi

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