Environmental News Network - To Improve Climate Models, An International Team Turns to Archaeological Data

Details: By University of Pennsylvania; 15.Apr

Climate modeling is future facing, its general intent to hypothesize what our planet might look like at some later date.

Julie Swatson

Climate modeling is future facing, its general intent to hypothesize what our planet might look like at some later date. Because the Earth’s vegetation influences climate, climate models frequently include vegetation reconstructions and are often validated by comparisons to the past. Yet such models tend to get oversimplified, glossing over or omitting how people affected the land and its cover.

The absence of such data led to LandCover6k, a project now in its sixth year that includes more than 200 archaeologists, historians, geographers, paleoecologists, and climate modelers around the world.

Led by archeologists Kathleen Morrison of the University of Pennsylvania, Marco Madella of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Nicki Whitehouse of the University of Glasgow, with data expertise from Penn landscape archaeologist Emily Hammer and others, LandCover6k’s goal is to aggregate archaeological and historical evidence of land-use systems from four slices of time—12,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, and around the year 1500—into a single database that anyone can comprehend and use.

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To Improve Climate Models, An International Team Turns to Archaeological Data