This UKRI-funded Doctoral Fellowship is part of the European Commission funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Doctoral Network within the project “Dryland Agriculture and Land Use; Past, Present and Future Resilience (AGRI-DRY)”. The candidate (DC5) will work on the topic “Land cover changes and formation of cultural landscapes”. This project will build upon publicly available palaeoecological datasets available from Mediterranean Europe and southern Africa to examine changes in land cover and impacts of early farming communities upon existing landscape structure and biodiversity. Using Bayesian chronologies, the landscape palaeoecological record will be linked to existing and developing crop assemblage data from the literature, work of other AGRI-DRY researchers (DCs 3 and 4) to establish effects of subsistence practices upon the landscape and its biodiversity, and understand how land cover varied across space and time and in response to changing agricultural practices. New palaeoecological data (pollen, charcoal) will be generated as needed based on an initial synthesis of the data and identification of research gaps, working alongside colleagues in South Africa (Project Partner NWU). Reconstruction of pollen-inferred land cover changes will use appropriate modelling techniques, some of which may need additional development. The quantification of land cover changes is especially challenging due to the variety of pollen productivity and dispersal mechanisms of tropical plant species which makes reconstructing land cover change especially difficult in these environments; several recent studies in southern Africa and Cameroon offer encouraging ways forward.
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