Human Impact on Holocene Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics
Summary
The Holocene epoch has witnessed profound interactions between human societies and terrestrial ecosystems. Early hunter-gatherer groups employed fire and selective harvesting to create clearings and promote the growth of favoured plant species, initiating the first instances of habitat modification. The advent of agriculture during the Neolithic accelerated land-clearance, soil disturbance and the spread of domesticated taxa, reshaping forest cover and altering nutrient cycles. Over successive millennia, pastoralism, craft industries and urban expansion drove further deforestation, soil degradation and biotic exchanges across continents. Contemporary research combines high-resolution palaeoecological records, molecular tracers and modelling to disentangle human influences from climate-driven vegetation change. This work reveals the deep-time legacy of anthropogenic niche construction, informs the resilience of forest ecosystems to disturbance and underpins modern strategies for biodiversity conservation, carbon management and sustainable land use.
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Human Impact on Holocene Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in human impact on holocene ecology and vegetation dynamics across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Holocene: The current geological epoch, beginning c. 11 700 years ago, marked by relatively stable climate and the rise of human civilisation.
Palaeoecology: The study of past ecosystems and their interactions using fossil, sedimentary and geochemical evidence.
Proxy: An indirect measure (e.g. pollen, charcoal, isotopes) used to reconstruct past environmental and climatic conditions.
Niche construction: The process by which organisms, including humans, modify their own and each other’s ecological niches through behaviours such as land clearance or cultivation.
sedaDNA: Sedimentary ancient DNA recovered from environmental samples, enabling identification of past species presence and community composition.
References
- Firewood, food and human niche construction: the potential role of Mesolithic hunter–gatherers in actively structuring Scotland's woodlands. Quaternary Science Reviews (2015).
- Tracking Hunter-Gatherer Impact on Vegetation in Last Interglacial and Holocene Europe: Proxies and Challenges. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory (2022).
- Palaeoecological signals for Mesolithic land use in a Central European landscape?. Journal of Quaternary Science (2022).
- Forests and foragers: exploitation of wood resources by Mesolithic and para-Neolithic societies in north-eastern Poland. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany (2020).
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