Extending the Anthropocene? Synthesizing Land Use and land cover data for the Holocene, a new global working group

Abstract:

Outside the geophysical sciences, the concept of the Anthropocene has been enthusiastically received. Its meaning, however, has been expanded beyond its original compass to suggest that humans have only recently had a significant impact on global processes. This is unfortunate, since paleoecological and archaeological data suggest significant anthropogenic transformation of land cover and land forms by the mid-Holocene. A new working group, LandCover 6k, is working to aggregate and synthesize global land use and land cover data across the Holocene in order to address these transformations more precisely.