Various small-scale anthropogenic relief features exist as legacies of (pre-)historic human land occupation and cultivation. Widespread and relatively well-documented examples are ridge and furrow systems, agricultural terraces, burial mounds or the remains of charcoal kiln sites.
Besides the modification of the relief, the anthropogenic influence on such sites has mostly caused an alteration of the soils, sedimentology or stratigraphy. Whether on purpose, in case of agricultural landforms, or not, the sites frequently differ from the surrounding landscapes in soil chemistry (e.g., soil pH, organic matter content, nutrient contents) or soil physical properties (e.g., bulk density, water retention, texture). As a consequence, anthropogenic relief features can have specific ecological conditions and therefore affect, e.g., plant growth, species composition or soil development resulting in a diversified landscape.

In this session, we would like to gather studies focusing on different anthropogenic relief features, working on various scales and in different ecosystems in order to compare the legacy effects of different land use types and to make connections between small-scale anthropogenic relief features and their surrounding environment.

We invite contributions that approach the ecological significance of small-scale anthropogenic relief features by
- mapping their occurrence, e.g., using remote sensing data, digital elevation models, or field surveys
- analyzing their specific soil and sedimentological characteristics and their effects on plants and ecosystems
- exploring ecological interactions and interdependencies between anthropogenic relief features and their surrounding landscape
- studying ecological succession on anthropogenically influenced sites

By bringing together such studies, the session aims at making a step towards an assessment of the effects of land use legacies on a landscape scale.