A high-resolution and harmonized model approach for reconstructing and analysing historic land changes in Europe

[摘要] Human-induced land use changes are nowadays the second largest contributor toatmospheric carbon dioxide after fossil fuel combustion. Existing historicland change reconstructions on the European scale do not sufficiently meetthe requirements of greenhouse gas (GHG) and climate assessments, due toinsufficient spatial and thematic detail and the consideration of variousland change types. This paper investigates if the combination of differentdata sources, more detailed modelling techniques, and the integration of landconversion types allow us to create accurate, high-resolution historic landchange data for Europe suited for the needs of GHG and climate assessments.We validated our reconstruction with historic aerial photographs from 1950and 1990 for 73 sample sites across Europe and compared it with other landreconstructions like Klein Goldewijk et al. (2010, 2011), Ramankutty andFoley (1999), Pongratz et al. (2008) and Hurtt et al. (2006). The resultsindicate that almost 700 000 km² (15.5%) of land cover in Europehas changed over the period 1950–2010, an area similar to France. InSouthern Europe the relative amount was almost 3.5% higher than average(19%). Based on the results the specific types of conversion, hot-spotsof change and their relation to political decisions and socio-economictransitions were studied. The analysis indicates that the main drivers ofland change over the studied period were urbanization, the reforestationprogram resulting from the timber shortage after the Second World War, the fall of theIron Curtain, the Common Agricultural Policy and accompanying afforestationactions of the EU. Compared to existing land cover reconstructions, the newmethod considers the harmonization of different datasets by achieving a highspatial resolution and regional detail with a full coverage of different landcategories. These characteristics allow the data to be used to support andimprove ongoing GHG inventories and climate research.

[学科分类] 地球化学与岩石