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      European agricultural terraces and lynchets: from archaeological theory to heritage management

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          ABSTRACT

          Terraces are highly productive, culturally distinctive socioecological systems. Although they form part of time/place-specific debates, terraces per se have been neglected – fields on slopes or landscape elements. We argue that this is due to mapping and dating problems, and lack of artefacts/ecofacts. However, new techniques can overcome some of these constraints, allowing us to re-engage with theoretical debates around agricultural intensification. Starting from neo-Broserupian propositions, we can engage with the sociopolitical and environmental aspects of terrace emergence, maintenance and abandonment. Non-reductionist avenues include identifying and dating different phases of development within single terrace systems, identifying a full crop-range, and other activities not generally associated with terraces (e.g. metallurgy). The proposition here is that terraces are a multi-facetted investment that includes both intensification and diversification and can occur under a range of social conditions but which constitutes a response to demographic pressure in the face to fluctuating environmental conditions.

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          Using plant functional traits to understand the landscape distribution of multiple ecosystem services

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            Used planet: A global history

            Human use of land has transformed ecosystem pattern and process across most of the terrestrial biosphere, a global change often described as historically recent and potentially catastrophic for both humanity and the biosphere. Interdisciplinary paleoecological, archaeological, and historical studies challenge this view, indicating that land use has been extensive and sustained for millennia in some regions and that recent trends may represent as much a recovery as an acceleration. Here we synthesize recent scientific evidence and theory on the emergence, history, and future of land use as a process transforming the Earth System and use this to explain why relatively small human populations likely caused widespread and profound ecological changes more than 3,000 y ago, whereas the largest and wealthiest human populations in history are using less arable land per person every decade. Contrasting two spatially explicit global reconstructions of land-use history shows that reconstructions incorporating adaptive changes in land-use systems over time, including land-use intensification, offer a more spatially detailed and plausible assessment of our planet's history, with a biosphere and perhaps even climate long ago affected by humans. Although land-use processes are now shifting rapidly from historical patterns in both type and scale, integrative global land-use models that incorporate dynamic adaptations in human–environment relationships help to advance our understanding of both past and future land-use changes, including their sustainability and potential global effects.
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              DNA from soil mirrors plant taxonomic and growth form diversity.

              Ecosystems across the globe are threatened by climate change and human activities. New rapid survey approaches for monitoring biodiversity would greatly advance assessment and understanding of these threats. Taking advantage of next-generation DNA sequencing, we tested an approach we call metabarcoding: high-throughput and simultaneous taxa identification based on a very short (usually <100 base pairs) but informative DNA fragment. Short DNA fragments allow the use of degraded DNA from environmental samples. All analyses included amplification using plant-specific versatile primers, sequencing and estimation of taxonomic diversity. We tested in three steps whether degraded DNA from dead material in soil has the potential of efficiently assessing biodiversity in different biomes. First, soil DNA from eight boreal plant communities located in two different vegetation types (meadow and heath) was amplified. Plant diversity detected from boreal soil was highly consistent with plant taxonomic and growth form diversity estimated from conventional above-ground surveys. Second, we assessed DNA persistence using samples from formerly cultivated soils in temperate environments. We found that the number of crop DNA sequences retrieved strongly varied with years since last cultivation, and crop sequences were absent from nearby, uncultivated plots. Third, we assessed the universal applicability of DNA metabarcoding using soil samples from tropical environments: a large proportion of species and families from the study site were efficiently recovered. The results open unprecedented opportunities for large-scale DNA-based biodiversity studies across a range of taxonomic groups using standardized metabarcoding approaches. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                World Archaeol
                World Archaeol
                World Archaeology
                Routledge
                0043-8243
                1470-1375
                23 March 2021
                2020
                23 March 2021
                : 52
                : 4 , Debates and emerging questions in World Archaeology
                : 566-588
                Affiliations
                [a ]Natural Sciences, Tromsø University Museum, Arctic University of Tromsø; , Tromsø, Norway
                [b ]Geography & Environmental Science, University of Southampton; , Southampton, UK
                [c ]Department of Archaeology, University of York; , York, UK
                [d ]Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry, University of Padova; , Legnaro, Italy
                Author notes
                CONTACT Antony Brown antony.g.brown@ 123456uit.no Natural Sciences, Tromsø University Museum, Arctic University of Tromsø; , Kvaløyvegan 30, Tromsø 9013, Norway
                Author information
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1990-4654
                https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1621-2625
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6717-473X
                https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8042-836X
                https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0043-5226
                Article
                1891963
                10.1080/00438243.2021.1891963
                8452142
                34556890
                aed5b3ea-026a-46e7-8ff9-d37fd03eae42
                © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

                This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

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                Page count
                Figures: 6, Tables: 3, References: 145, Pages: 23
                Categories
                Research Article
                Articles

                agricultural intensification,population density,agricultural sustainability,landscape change,terrace classification,remote sensing

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