Quantification of land cover and land use change has become an increasingly important topic to various groups, such as palaeoclimate modellers, conservation ecologists, and others interested in the impacts of human activities upon ‘natural’ environments. Human impacts on land cover have been particularly evident since the emergence of early agricultural societies and understanding of these processes throughout the Holocene requires the use of environmental reconstruction approaches. This session aims to draw together researchers focused on different approaches to reconstructing long-term human modification of landscapes. This includes methods employed to reconstruct land cover, vegetation, and land use change, such as pollen analysis and modelling techniques, approaches to understand past demographic change, cultural and societal shifts, and the consequences of human impacts on biogeochemical cycles. Such studies, and those incorporating multiple proxies on a variety of scales from across the globe, will be particularly relevant. This session links with the PAGES working group LandCover6k, which is focused on climate-induced, natural, and anthropogenically-induced global land-cover change and brings palaeoecologists, historians, archaeologists, and modellers together with the aim to create products suitable for climate modellers and policy makers.