New research shows that disruptions to Indigenous land management following Iberian colonization did not always result in widespread forest regrowth in the Americas and Asia-Pacific, as has been recently argued.
A new study, published now in Nature Ecology and Evolution, draws on pollen records from tropical regions formerly claimed by the Spanish Empire in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, to test the significance and extent of forest regrowth following widespread mortality among Indigenous populations after European contact in the 15th and 16th centuries. By analyzing microscopic pollen grains preserved in lake sediments, scientists are able to build up a picture as to how environments have changed over time.
It is well documented that the arrival of Europeans in the Americas resulted in the spread of diseases including small pox, measles, typhus and cholera to Indigenous populations, many of whom were practicing sedentary agriculture. Archaeological and historical records indicate that this may have wiped out up to 90% of the Indigenous population, making it perhaps the most significant epidemiological disaster ever known. What is less known, however, is the impact of this so-called «Great Dying» on tropical landscapes that had, by this point, been managed by food producers and even urban dwellers for millennia.
Researchers have recently argued in a widely popularized paper that the drastic reduction in Indigenous populations, and the cessation of their land-use in many tropical parts of the Neotropics, led to a dramatic regrowth of forest. So significant was this ecological change, the paper argues, that these new trees captured enough carbon to cause a recognizable dip in global atmospheric CO2 levels. This global atmospheric change is not only implicated in the Little Ice Age that caused lakes to freeze over in Europe, but has also been suggested as a potential start date for the Anthropocene.
Nevertheless, existing assessments of forest regrowth are based on a limited number of environmental records and have been exclusively focused on the Americas. In the new study, the research team, comprising palaeoecologists, archaeologists and historians, set out to empirically test the proposed link between colonization and forest regrowth by synthesizing and assessing long-term records of tropical vegetation change from across the Americas, as well as the often-overlooked Asian-Pacific domain of the Spanish Empire.
Their analysis paints a much more complex picture of colonial human-environment interactions.
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