My research interests concentrate on Quaternary environmental history and the role of land cover in influencing global climate. Specifically, I study the way climate change affects land use and land cover, and how these, in turn, affect hydrological cycles, soil, the atmosphere and the built environment. Starting with my broad educational background in earth and environmental sciences, and leveraging that with my interest in programming and high-performance computing, I established myself as a leader in modeling the role of the earth’s land cover in the climate system. I led development of a series of global land surface models: BIOME4, LPJ, and ARVE-DGVM, to address key questions in the role of land cover in the climate system. Today, these models are used not only in my research group, but also by hundreds of researchers around the world to tackle diverse questions about the future of our planet, ranging from air quality to biodiversity, ecosystem services and animal habitats, and to pathways for humanity to adapt land use systems to be resilient in the face of future climate change.
Carbon in indigenous and pre-industrial anthromes: An overview of stocks and processes
JED O. KAPLAN
Department of Earth Sciences, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong
While many studies consider the vaguely defined “preindustrial era” as a period when anthropogenic influence on the global carbon cycle was minimal or non-existent, it is increasingly clear that millennia of land use before the Industrial Revolution caused major changes in the structure of terrestrial ecosystems. Here, I will give an overview of the diversity, spatial, and temporal expression of pre-industrial land use from the Last Glacial Maximum to the 19th century CE. Already in the late Pleistocene, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers’ use of fire caused major changes in forest cover and concomitant carbon stocks. With the advent of agriculture and pastoralism in the Holocene, deforestation, soil erosion, irrigation, and wetland manipulation further modified the amount of carbon in anthromes, in many places reducing, but in some augmenting, carbon stocks. The late-preindustrial world was already transformed by urbanization, global trade in commodities, and exploitation of landscapes for natural resources. In this presentation I will summarize the state of the art and review the major open questions and priorities for future research, especially moving beyond deforestation as the basic metric of past human influence on the environment.