The 14th century was a tumultuous time for the people of Europe. Persistent cold, wet weather at the beginning of the century led to widespread agricultural failures and unprecedented levels of starvation in what became known as the Great Famine from 1315 to 1317.
The Black Death era is the perfect opportunity to look at the effects of humans on biodiversity over a longer period, Jonathan Gordon, a paleoecologist at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York and first author of the paper, told Live Science.
The pollen records "give us information on the past diversity of the plant records," Gordon said.
The researchers divided the pollen data into three categories based on the presence of cereal pollen: places where agricultural production went up, places where it went down, and places where there was no evidence of cereal cultivation.
"In those landscapes where agricultural production went down, there was a reduction in biodiversity of around 40%. Then, after about 150 years, as populations started recovering and landscape disturbances started increasing again, biodiversity went up to slightly above the level it was before."
Mosaic landscapes
There is a growing body of evidence showing that people's long-term cultural shaping of their landscapes often creates more diverse habitats, known as "mosaics," that can sustain more species than simple homogenous landscapes can, he said.
"In that landscape, you had lots of natural features that remained from the Middle or Early Holocene (which began after the last Ice Age about 12,000 years ago)," he added. "You had old bits of woodland, you had heaths, you had ponds, and bits of secondary forest. It was all interlaced with these agricultural mosaics, and that led to raised biodiversity because there were more habitats for different plant species to exploit."
Modern farming often uses monoculture, where one crop species is grown over a large area. This lowers biodiversity in the area. (Image credit: alffoto via Getty Images)"What this work contributes to showing is that, until relatively recently, even in Europe, very different forms of land management and interaction were practiced than exist today," Patrick Roberts, director of Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, told Live Science in an email.
Related stories"Rather than the monoculture, plantations, or uniform changes to landscapes we see in the 20th and 21st centuries, emphasis was placed on maintaining 'mosaics,'" said Roberts, who was not involved in the new research.
There is still more to understand about how humans' disappearance from landscapes in the Black Death era affected the natural world, Gordon said. "There are a lot of other types of diversity — not just the number of types, but what the different types present actually do." There may be a hundred types of plants in a landscape, but if they do the same thing, "you have low functional diversity," he said.
Functional diversity "is super important for how ecosystems adapt to changes in climate and how resilient they are, which is something we need for future-proofing our agricultural system," Gordon said.
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