Global Forest Fragmentation

Contributors

Andrew D. Barnes, Systemic Conservation Biology, J.F. Blumenbach Institute of Zoology and Anthropology, University of Göttingen, Berliner Strasse 28, 37073 Göttingen, Germany. E-mail: abarnes@gwdg.de

Keith Barney, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. E-mail: keith.barney@anu.edu.au

Christopher Barr, Woods & Wayside International, Hopewell, New Jersey, USA. E-mail: cbarr@woods-wayside.org

Jürgen Bauhus, Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Freiburg, Germany. E-mail: juergen.bauhus@waldbau.uni-freiburg.de

Shonil Bhagwat, Department of Geography, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA, UK; School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK; Linacre College, Oxford, OX1 3JA, UK. E-mail: shonil.bhagwat@open.ac.uk

Virginie Boreux, Institute of Ecology, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany; Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Freiburg, Germany, E-mail: virginie.boreux@nature.uni-freiburg.de

M. Jahi Chappell, Agroecology and Agriculture Policy, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA; School of the Environment, Washington State University Vancouver, Vancouver, Washington, USA. E-mail: m.jahi.chappell@vancouver.wsu.edu

Richard T. Corlett, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Menglun, Mengla, Yunnan 66630, PR China. E-mail: corlett@xtbg.org.cn

Katharine J.M. Dickinson, Department of Botany, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand. E-mail: kath.dickinson@otago.ac.nz

Raphael K. Didham, School of Animal Biology, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley WA 6009, Australia; CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Centre for Environment and Life Sciences, Underwood Ave, Perth, WA 6014, Australia. E-mail: raphael.didham@uwa.edu.au

Timm F. Döbert, School of Animal Biology, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley WA 6009, Australia; CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Centre for Environment and Life Sciences, Underwood Ave, Perth, WA 6014, Australia. E-mail: dobert01@student.uwa.edu.au

Laurène Feintrenie, Goods and Services of Tropical Forest Ecosystems, Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD), F-34398 Montpellier, France. E-mail: laurene.feintrenie@cirad.fr

Aline Finger, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Genetics and Conservation, Edinburgh, EH3 5LR, UK. E-mail: a.finger@rbge.ac.uk

Joern Fischer, Institute of Ecology, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany. E-mail: joern.fischer@uni.leuphana.de

William A. Foster, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EJ, UK. E-mail: waf1@hermes.cam.ac.uk

Claude A. Garcia, Department of Environmental System Science, ETH Zurich, Switzerland; Goods and Services of Tropical Forest Ecosystems, Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD), F-34398 Montpellier, France. E-mail: claude.garcia@usys.ethz.ch

Jan C. Habel, Technische Universität München, Department of Ecology and Ecosystem Management Center for Food and Life Sciences 85354 Freising, Germany. E-mail: janchristianhabel@gmx.de

Rhett D. Harrison, World Agroforestry Centre East Asia Node Kunming Institute of Botany, Kunming 650201, PR China. E-mail: r.harrison@cgiar.org

Chris J. Kettle, ETH Zurich, Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems, Ecosystem Management, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland. E-mail: chris.kettle@env.ethz.ch

Alexandra-Maria Klein, Institute of Ecology, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany; Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Freiburg, Germany. E-mail: alexandra.klein@nature.uni-freiburg.de

Lian Pin Koh, School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, and the Environment Institute, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia. E-mail: lianpinkoh@gmail.com

Sarah A. Laird, People and Plants International, Bristol, VT 05443, USA. E-mail: sarahlaird@aol.com

William F. Laurance, Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Science & School of Marine and Tropical Biology, James Cook University, Cairns, Queensland, Australia. E-mail: bill.laurance@jcu.edu.au

Yang chen Lin, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EJ, UK. E-mail: linyangchen@gmail.com

Sarah H. Luke, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EJ, UK. E-mail: sarah.h.luke@gmail.com

Kelvin S.-H. Peh, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EJ, UK; Institute for Life Sciences, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK. E-mail: kelvin.peh@gmail.com

Stacy M. Philpott, Environmental Studies Department, University of California, Santa Cruz, California, USA. E-mail: sphilpot@ucsc.edu

Ute Radespiel, University of Veterinary Medicine Hanover, Institute of Zoology, D-30559 Hanover, Germany. E-mail: ute.radespiel@tiho-hannover.de

Edgar C. Turner, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EJ, UK. E-mail: ect23@cam.ac.uk

Bruce L. Webber, CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Centre for Environment and Life Sciences, Underwood Ave, Perth, WA 6014, Australia; School of Plant Biology, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia. E-mail: bruce.webber@csiro.au

Preface

Forest fragmentation is sometimes deceptive because a forest appears to be intact, and human impact seems minimal. If there are lots of trees everywhere, what is the problem? Even remote sensing using satellites to survey larger areas often suggests that a landscape is largely covered in trees, and the area is considered forest. Yet forest fragmentation can fundamentally alter the ecology of a forested region even when roads, agricultural fields, logging or other human activities only eliminate a small proportion of the habitat. For example, forest fragmentation allows greater access to hunters who remove large vertebrates, with a subsequent loss of seed dispersal for the plants, predator control of rodents and other ecological services. Villagers and other local people can more easily enter forest fragments and remove edible, medicinal and ornamental plants, and often firewood as well. Invasive plants and animals migrate along the forest edge and penetrate into the forest, in the process fundamentally changing the biological community. Microsite changes, including lower humidity, higher wind speeds and increased incidence of fire, can all kill trees and animals at the fragment edge and alter conditions hundreds of metres into the forest. These forces often act synergistically to degrade the biodiversity of forest fragments.

Even though we understand the pernicious effects of forest fragmentation, the remaining areas of forest in the world continue to be fragmented by human activities. An increasingly extensive road network is penetrating remote areas of the world. The high prices for commodities create greater incentive to log forests for their timber and to convert natural forest into plantations of crops such as coffee, oil palm and rubber. The result is ever more forest fragmentation and the creation of smaller fragment sizes. Although the decline in traditional rural populations in many areas of the world results in less pressure for subsistence agriculture, the globalization of the world’s economy and the increasing human population put greater pressure on the land for intensive agriculture, harvesting timber and the growing of crops for international markets.

In this series of 10 chapters (following an Introduction) an international group of authors cover the major questions of forest fragmentation as general questions affecting the world’s forest biodiversity, ecosystem function and ecosystem services. These are not merely case studies from particular places in the world, confirming what we already know. Rather, these are carefully selected topics that provide a broad overview of the major questions confronting forest ecologists, conservation biologists and environmental policy makers. Among the key themes throughout the book are whether land sharing or land intensification represents a better way to protect biodiversity, if subsidies from carbon sequestration programmes such as REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) can provide a permanent solution to forest conservation and how forest fragments will be able to persist during a changing climate. An additional topic is the extent to which government policies can reverse the effects of forest fragmentation and rebuild the forest systems that can protect biodiversity. As such, this book will make excellent reading for graduate students seeking to understand the general topic of forest fragmentation and to discern which are the major questions of current concern. Furthermore, this will provide a valuable reference for environmental policy makers, while conservation biologists and ecologists can use these essays to develop a cutting-edge research agenda.

Professor Richard B. Primack

Acknowledgements

We would like to extend our gratitude to all our colleagues at ETH Zurich, particularly within the Ecosystem Management Group, who provided encouragement and advice, especially Jaboury Ghazoul. Special thanks to Vicki Bonham and the staff at CAB International for their patience during the development of the book and continued editorial support during its completion. Not least, we thank all the chapter contributors for their reliability and responsiveness to e-mails and requests. We would also like to acknowledge David Burslem for providing additional encouragement in the initial stages of developing the ideas for this book. Finally, special thanks are due to family Kettle-Martin for tolerating the additional workload that this book generated. Perhaps one day this book might be of interest to them, but we hope the threats to forests and the rate of forest fragmentation will have reduced by then.

1 Global Forest Fragmentation: Introduction

Chris J. Kettle¹* and Lian Pin Koh²

¹ETH Zurich, Switzerland; ²University of Adelaide, Australia

Forest fragmentation has profound global impacts. Not only does this impact on the Earth’s potential to sustain biological diversity, but ecosystem function and numerous ecosystem services including climate change mitigation, food security and livelihoods are also all altered. Forest fragmentation is an inevitable result of population growth and economic development, which thus presents a major environmental challenge. This challenge is to ensure that future anthropogenic landscapes have the capacity to sustain biodiversity and ecosystem function and provision, the wide range of services upon which humanity depends. This book provides a cutting-edge review of the multidisciplinary sciences related to the study of forest fragmentation. Specifically, it addresses cross-cutting themes from ecological and social sciences perspectives to provide a valuable resource to students, forest scientists, resource managers, agricultural extension workers and policy makers. The ultimate goal of this book is to help form the scientific basis for future forest-landscape management and planning to meet global environmental and societal needs. Although the book covers forest fragmentation from a global perspective, there is some inevitable bias towards the regions of the world where forest fragmentation is most pressing and where the consequences are the furthest reaching.

We begin with a historical perspective of forest fragmentation from 33 locations around the world. In Chapter 2, Shonil Bhagwat pieces together snippets of information from case studies to reconstruct a timeline of global forest fragmentation during the Holocene (the last 11,500 years). He reveals that the timeline, scale and extent of deforestation are highly variable. In Africa, for example, genetic studies have suggested that the first occurrence of forest opening in Madagascar appears to be pre-human, possibly implying the role of environmental drivers of prehistoric land-cover change, whereas in the Americas, deforestation began during the Little Ice Age (700–1000 years before present), particularly on the Yucatan Peninsula by the Mayan civilization. Subsequently, the arrival of the Spanish and climatic change exacerbated forest loss in that region. It was a different story in Asia, where human impact on forests began earlier than in the Americas. For example, analysis of fossil pollen data has suggested that large-scale deforestation of evergreen oak forests happened between 5300 and 4500 years before present in the middle Yangtze basin in north China. Bhagwat concluded that forest loss and fragmentation have been major processes in landscape development in Europe during the last 11,500 years; the same drivers of deforestation in Europe are also evident on other continents, including the Americas, Australasia and Eurasia, although the timing of deforestation might be different, and the eastern Mediterranean region has some of the earliest reported dates of deforestation.

Chapter 3 fast forwards the story to the present time, as William Laurance discusses several contemporary drivers of habitat fragmentation worldwide. In recent decades, drivers of land-cover change have shifted dramatically from small-scale farming and rural development to industrial activities including large-scale farming, ranching and tree plantations. Much of this change is driven by globalization to meet rising demands for goods moving from developing to developed nations. The opening up of forests often also has severe knock-on effects. For example, logging, mining, fossil-fuel extraction and infrastructure projects are creating an economic impetus for road building in many frontier areas, which also promotes habitat loss. This often results in a vicious cycle of land development until all forests are almost completely destroyed, degraded and fragmented. In general, old-growth forests are declining rapidly across the planet and are being replaced by fragmented, secondary and logged forests and plantation monocultures. Although forest regeneration may partially mitigate habitat fragmentation in some regions, rapidly expanding plantations of non-native tree species typically have limited benefits for biodiversity.

In Chapter 4, Döbert and colleagues take on the hugely difficult and often contentious issue of conserving species in human-dominated landscapes. Conservation management is only just beginning to come to grips with the challenges faced in moving away from the traditional patch-focused approach of conservation in gazetted nature reserves towards a landscape-focused approach of conserving biodiversity in a mosaic that includes managed and semi-natural habitats. More importantly, the processes operating in the land-use matrix surrounding forest remnants drive many of the negative impacts of land-use change on remnant forest but at the same time play a vital role in long-term biodiversity conservation in fragmented landscapes. Therefore, the authors argue that the maintenance of biodiversity will depend as much, if not more, on the extent, magnitude and spatial structuring of landscape processes within the degraded matrix surrounding primary forest remnants.

In Chapter 5, Finger and colleagues review the broad range of genetic consequences faced by both animal and plant species as a consequence of forest fragmentation. The negative genetic consequences and their underlying drivers are often cryptic and notoriously difficult to identify. Not only because they involve processes that are hard to observe in the wild, such as dispersal, gene flow, mating systems and inbreeding but also because these can operate over complex spatial and temporal scales. This chapter identifies many of the key ways in which molecular approaches can be applied to advance our understanding of these critical processes and how species traits might influence their vulnerability to forest fragmentation genetics. Some species appear to be far less vulnerable to fragmentation genetics, and this chapter asks the question of why this is so and what traits are important in the context of forest species. By reviewing the state of knowledge and critical challenges, the chapter provides a stage upon which to set priority areas for future research.

How would climate change interact with human drivers of land-cover change to influence the future trajectory of forest loss and fragmentation? And, perhaps more crucially, how would forest loss feedback to and influence future climate change? These are essentially the questions dealt with by Richard Corlett in Chapter 6. Forest fragments are vulnerable to climate change, both directly and through changes in fire frequency and intensity. Gaps between fragments will also reduce the ability of forest species to track climate change by movements along climate gradients. Conversely, forest fragments retain carbon that would otherwise be lost to the atmosphere and contribute to global warming. Therefore, protecting and restoring fragments can help mitigate climate change by reducing emissions and increasing sinks, especially if larger forest areas are unavailable. If fragments are actively restored, it makes sense to use plants adapted to the expected future climate, even if this involves the ‘managed translocation’ of species outside their current ranges.

One of the most contentious issues in conservation science surrounds the debate on whether biodiversity should be integrated on the same land (land sharing) or separated from agriculture (land sparing). In Chapter 7, Klein and colleagues discuss the virtues of both approaches using actual case studies. They argue that, with regard to land sharing, there is no simple trade-off between biodiversity and yield, and the complexity of crop yield–biodiversity relationships has not yet been fully investigated. Land-sparing management has to be considered at different spatial scales, as agriculture in large-scale land sparing generally does not benefit much from ecosystem services mediated by forest biodiversity, although small forest remnants can enhance biodiversity in large agricultural and forestry plantations. The authors conclude that both land sharing and land sparing can promote biodiversity without compromising high yields, and that a combination of management strategies at different spatial scales, including the maintenance of forest connectivity, may most effectively safeguard both biodiversity and livelihood security.

In Chapter 8, Peh and colleagues examine the impact of forest fragmentation on ecological functioning. They found that the severity and direction of fragmentation effects are influenced by the individual species involved, the environment and other contributory factors (e.g. surrounding matrix habitat quality), and while processes heavily influenced by larger species are likely to respond negatively to fragmentation, others influenced by a wider range of biotic and abiotic factors are less predictable. In addition, cascading effects through the trophic levels may result in the impacts on one trophic level affecting other parts of the ecosystem, and the impacts of fragmentation are often exacerbated by synergistic effects such as interactions with the matrix and increased hunting pressures within fragments.

Forest habitats provide a multitude of economic and ecological services from local to global scales. With over 2 billion rural poor depending on forests to some degree for their livelihoods, understanding how fragmentation might disrupt the provisioning of these livelihoods is a global challenge. In Chapter 9, Garcia and Feintrenie tackle this knotty problem. Their analysis of the impacts of forest fragmentation on livelihoods starts with a careful look at definitions of fragmentation and drivers from both a social and environmental perspective. Using the forest transition curve as a heuristic frame, this chapter presents the myriad of ways that forest fragmentation impacts on livelihoods, from increased wildlife–human conflict to changes in fire frequencies as forest edge increases. Fragmentation can have positive benefits for forest-based livelihoods, and balancing these trade-offs in future forest landscapes is central to multiple-use landscape management and ensuring rapid development in countries while maintaining their forest cover.

Around 75% of forests globally are controlled by governments. In Chapter 10, Barr and colleagues examine the critical role that governance plays in shaping tropical forest fragmentation. Identifying the policy instruments and political challenges to reverse forest fragmentation is perhaps nowhere more urgent than in the tropics, where industrial logging and agro-industrial crops increasingly compete for forested land. This chapter presents the historical context of ‘political forests’ and explores the challenges of establishing novel sustainable regulations for logging concessions, due to corruption and limited political will. Forest fragmentation is not only driven by but has driven changes in policies, institutional structure and markets, and innovative and effective governance mechanisms are required to both slow and reverse fragmentation. The importance of extra-sectoral governance processes that incentivize forest fragmentation are increasingly globalized. Establishing forest governance that has meaningful forest tenure reform and innovative landscape-scale forest management policies that consider multiple objectives are urgently required.

Finally, in Chapter 11, we provide a summary of the major challenges to reversing forest fragmentation and a synthesis of the major topics covered in this book. We end with an optimistic outlook of the wide range of approaches that are being used to reverse forest fragmentation. Although this provides hope for the future of global forest landscapes, we still require a major shift in thinking from government bodies and industry. We hope that the pages of this book will go some way to ensuring the long-term persistence of forest landscapes that sustain a rich and fruitful habitat for generations to come.

2 The History of Deforestation and Forest Fragmentation: A Global Perspective

Shonil Bhagwat*

The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK; University of Oxford, Oxford, UK; Linacre College, Oxford, UK

Abstract

This chapter draws on long-term ecological studies from across the globe to reconstruct the history of deforestation and forest fragmentation. It includes studies from a variety of forest biomes focusing on the last 11,500 years (the Holocene), paying particular attention to forest fragmentation as a result of expanding agricultural frontiers. Piecing together evidence from a number of case studies from around the world, this chapter attempts to provide a timeline of the earliest occurrence of forest fragmentation and its extent. While there are a large number of studies from Europe and Asia and a few from the Americas, Australasia and Eurasia, limited information is available from tropical Americas, Africa, and South and South-east Asia. This chapter indicates the need for further research of the literature and a global meta-analysis to identify the evidence for historical deforestation and forest fragmentation. The chapter also highlights the need for long-term ecological research and palaeoeco-logical investigations to enhance our understanding of the historical timeline of deforestation and forest fragmentation in the tropics.

Historical Patterns of Deforestation and Forest Fragmentation

Humans are known to have deforested landscapes in many regions of the world throughout the Holocene – a time period spanning the last 11,500 years – causing a decline in forest cover, consequent loss of biodiversity and extinction of iconic species (Turvey, 2009). The history of deforestation, however, varies from region to region. For example, while it is widely accepted that anthropogenic land clearance for agriculture and grazing led to deforestation in many European landscapes during the mid-Holocene (Carcaillet et al., 2002; Tinner et al., 2005), there is limited understanding of deforestation in other regions of the world. Furthermore, the effects of mid-Holocene climate warming and anthropogenic deforestation are often confounded, making it difficult to separate the impact of human activity and climatic changes (e.g. Berglund, 2003; MartínezCortizas et al., 2009). A number of studies based on historical archives of fossilized pollen grains, plant parts and charcoal have, however, shed some light on the anthropogenic modification of landscapes throughout the history of agricultural expansion over the last 11,500 years. These studies suggest that anthropogenic deforestation has been one of the most pervasive processes in landscape development in Europe during the Holocene (Kaplan et al., 2009; see Chapter 3, this volume). Many of these studies also report the use of fire as a major driver of deforestation and indicate transformation of vegetation from forest to fire-adapted shrubland or grassland along with widespread evidence of burning, grazing and cultivation (e.g. Watkins et al., 2007; Zhao et al., 2010; Morales-Molino et al., 2011). Similar drivers of deforestation have been reported from other regions of the world, namely Central and South America, Australasia and Eurasia, although the timing of deforestation varies widely within and across regions (e.g. López et al., 2003; Horrocks et al., 2007; Carrillo-Bastos et al., 2012). This chapter attempts to examine these global patterns of deforestation and forest fragmentation. Although natural drivers such as sea-level rise may also lead to forest fragmentation in some parts of the world (e.g. Seychelles, Madagascar), this chapter focuses on deforestation and forest fragmentation driven by humans.

Forest fragmentation is the process of subdividing continuous forest into smaller patches, resulting in the loss of habitat, a reduction in patch size and increasing isolation of patches. The palaeoecological literature is based on interpretation of fossilized archives to determine the extent, timing and causes of ‘deforestation’ (the loss of forest cover), which goes in tandem with ‘forest fragmentation’. As such, this chapter assumes that anthropogenic deforestation takes place through the process of forest fragmentation. The available palaeoecological literature provides an insight into the history of forest loss during the Holocene. To examine the relevant literature, a search was carried out of the ISI Web of Knowledge℠ for three key words – deforestation, Holocene and human activity. A total of 33 studies published between 1995 and 2012 directly reported deforestation at the study sites (Fig. 2.1) and estimated the timing of this deforestation (Figs 2.2 and 2.3). From these estimates, the earliest reported date of deforestation was recorded from 33 locations around the world.

Fig. 2.1. Location of 33 site-specific studies from the palaeoecological literature reporting the earliest periods of deforestation and forest fragmentation. The majority of the studies (22 in total) were from Europe, seven were from Asia and the remaining four were from the Americas, Australasia and Eurasia.

Although this is not an exhaustive review of the literature, the literature surveyed points to some general global patterns and indicates data gaps in enhancing our understanding of global deforestation and forest fragmentation. A large majority of studies (22 in total) were carried out in Europe – five in northern Europe and Scandinavia, six in Central or Eastern Europe and the Alps, and five in southern Europe including the Iberian Peninsula. Four studies were carried out in the western and two in the eastern Mediterranean region. Seven studies were carried out in Asia – six in China and one in South Korea. There were two studies from the Americas: one in Central America and one in the south. One study was found from Australasia and one from Eurasia. There are a number of other studies that investigated deforestation or forest fragmentation using other methodological approaches (e.g. genetic analysis of single species or groups of species) or other, more recent, timescales. The focus of this chapter, however, is on landscape-scale deforestation caused by human presence and therefore the chapter focuses on the 33 examples identified in the literature.

Earliest time periods of deforestation and forest fragmentation reported in palaeoecological literature

Fig. 2.2. Earliest reported time period of deforestation in 33 case studies from the palaeoecological literature. Most studies reported the expansion of agricultural frontiers as the main cause of deforestation. The dates range from 300 to 8000 years before present. The sources of these studies are as follows: 1, Carrillo-Bastos et al. (2012); 2, Weng et al. (2004); 3, Wang et al. (2011); 4, Zhang et al. (2010); 5, Zhao et al. (2010); 6, Atahan et al. (2008); 7, Yang et al. (2005); 8, Saito et al. (2001); 9, Park et al. (2012); 10, Horrocks et al. (2007); 11, Lopez et al. (2003); 12, Huang (2002); 13, Watkins et al. (2007); 14, Macklin et al. (2000); 15, Bradshaw et al. (2005); 16, Karlsson et al. (2009); 17, Argant et al. (2006); 18, Guiter et al. (2005); 19, Wick et al. (2003); 20, Cyprien et al. (2004); 21, Lotter (2001); 22, Wacnik et al. (2012); 23, van der Knaap and van Leeuven (1995); 24, Kaal et al. (2011); 25, Lopez-Merino et al. (2009); 26, Moreno et al. (2011); 27, Morales-Molino et al. (2011); 28, Zanchetta et al. (2011); 29, Oldfield et al. (2003); 30, Di Rita and Magri (2009); 31, Guilizzoni et al. (2002); 32, Hajar et al. (2010); 33, Riehl and Marinova (2008).

Fig. 2.3. Summary of the earliest reported timeline of deforestation in 33 site-specific palaeoecological studies across the globe. The end lines represent the range of years reported, the grey points on each line represent median YBP (years before present), and numbers in parentheses refer to the number of studies from that region reported in this chapter (see Fig. 2.2 for earliest reported time periods of deforestation in each study).

These studies provide site-specific information on deforestation at 33 locations around the world and help us to gain an insight into the rough timeline of deforestation. This timeline is useful to understand how long the process of deforestation and forest fragmentation has operated in regions around the world. These studies also indicate that the historical timeline of deforestation might be very different at sites in one region, and therefore deforestation and fragmentation are site-specific phenomena. While historical deforestation in Europe has been widely reported, there are few studies from Africa and South-east Asia, and only two from the Americas, meaning that our understanding of the historical timeline of tropical deforestation will remain inadequate until long-term ecological studies have been carried out in these regions. With these caveats in mind, this chapter describes the historical timeline of deforestation in Europe and Asia and parts of the Americas, Australia and Eurasia based on a synthesis of 33 case studies from the palaeoecological literature.

Regional Patterns

The studies reviewed indicate that the timeline of deforestation varies from region to region. What these studies also indicate is that the scale and extent of deforestation are very different. Many of these studies provide an insight into land-use practices by prehistoric cultures and enable a greater understanding of the process of deforestation. For example, some of the studies have provided evidence of large-scale landscape transformation as a result of the expansion of agricultural frontiers, while others indicate small-scale deforestation creating smaller openings in the forest cover. These studies therefore help to enhance our understanding of land-use practices and their effect on forest cover at various sites around the world.

Africa

There is a small body of palaeoecological literature from Africa (e.g. Brncic et al., 2007; Virah-Sawmy et al., 2010), although it does not focus explicitly on identifying the earliest onset of deforestation and forest fragmentation during the Holocene. Quéméré et al. (2012) used genetic data to show that the origin of open habitats in Madagascar was pre-human, questioning the prevalent narrative of anthropogenic deforestation of the region. It is likely, however, that anthropogenic deforestation and forest fragmentation on a much smaller scale took place across Africa throughout the history of human presence on the continent.

Americas

Tchir et al. (2012) argued that deforestation in the USA and Canada was the result of forest removal for agriculture starting after the arrival of the first European settlers. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, more specialized forms of agriculture were practised, and by the early 20th century most of the deforestation had already taken place. Palaeoecological studies from the pre-European period in North America are rare, but available evidence suggests that landscape modifications in North America started well before Europeans arrived on the continent (Stinchcomb et al., 2011). The study indicates widespread landscape-scale changes during the Little Ice Age, 700–1000 years before present (YBP). Similarly, a large body of literature on the historical landscape development on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, suggests that the Mayan cultures who inhabited this region started large-scale deforestation during the late Holocene (Abrams and Rue 1998; Dunning et al., 2002; Leyden, 2002; Turner et al., 2003). Carrillo-Bastos et al. (2012) carried out a spatial analysis of pollen records from the Yucatan Peninsula and, based on their analysis, they provide an insight into the resource use of the Mayan culture. They suggested that deforestation at this site on the Yucatan Peninsula started around 1550 YBP, but this was often on a much smaller spatial scale than assumed by other authors. They speculated that most of the Yucatan Peninsula remained forested, with only small openings in the forest cover until about AD 450, just before the Spanish conquest, when large-scale deforestation ensued.

Weng et al. (2004) suggested, however, that deforestation in the highlands of Ecuador and Peru predated deforestation in the Yucatan Peninsula by several centuries. Based on pollen analysis, they demonstrated that pollen of various tree taxa (Alnus, Podocarpus and Hedyosmum) decreased at the same time as an increase in pollen of anthropogenic indicators, such as pollen grains from Ambrosia and those from plants in the families Chenopodiaceae and Amaranthaceae. A similar trend is seen in other records, namely from Marcacocha and Baja (Hansen and Rodbell, 1995; Chepstow-Lusty et al., 1996, 2003), suggesting that this deforestation phenomenon around 4500 YBP might have been more widespread than the