Vegetation changes since the late Middle Ages around Bern, Switzerland

Abstract

AbstractWhile the impacts of modern farming and land use practices on climate and biodiversity since 1900 are well-studied in Western and Central Europe, less is known about the preceding transitional period of the 18th and 19th century. By combining information from both natural and historical archives, this study strives to understand the impacts of 18th century agrarian modernisation on Central European ecosystems. Here we present a multi-proxy palaeoecological study from Egelsee (548 m a.s.l., within the city of Bern, Switzerland) spanning the late Middle Ages to the early 20th century. We use pollen, charcoal, dung fungal spores and spheroidal carbonaceous particles (SCPs) as proxies for vegetation and land use changes as well as radiocarbon wiggle matching for the chronology. Our pollen record suggests a shift from cereal cultivation towards grazing from the 16th century onwards, and from the 18th century towards fertilised meadows for animal husbandry. The pollen-inferred decrease of woods since 1700 quantitatively confirms the historically described timber scarcity in the lowlands of Switzerland, while the positive correlation between climate indices and our pollen-inferred cereal production suggests a certain vulnerability of societies to subsistence crises. From the 1850s, urbanisation rapidly altered the vegetation from an open agricultural landscape to a highly urbanised area, leading to a decline of biodiversity towards the present. This study shows that historically well-documented changes in agricultural practices in livestock farming and fodder production, and later urbanisation, can likewise be reconstructed with palaeoecological approaches. Our interdisciplinary approach provides new insights into how agricultural innovations affected vegetation and ecosystems during the past 500 years.