Human land occupation and cultivation often results in characteristic modifications of the land surface, sediments and soils. Widespread examples for pedological and geomorphological land use legacies are charcoal hearth sites, ridge and furrow systems, agricultural terraces, grazing structures or burial mounds. Pedological legacy effects also occur in transitional zones of land use, e.g., in abandoned agricultural areas, without a concurrent characteristic modification of the surface morphology.
Legacy soils and landforms provide a valuable archive function for geoarchaeological studies of past land use systems. They have an enormous potential for process-related research, e.g., for studying long-term effects of carbon enrichment or depletion or of physical compaction. Furthermore, land use legacies also affect current ecosystems, as legacy sites often differ from the surrounding landscape in soil chemistry or soil physical properties and in consequence can exhibit altered species composition, plant growth or cover.
In this session, we would like to gather studies focusing on different types of pedological and geomorphological land use legacies, working on various scales and in different ecosystems. We invite contributions that approach the ecological, geomorphological and geoarchaeological significance of land use legacy soils and landforms by:
- mapping the occurrence of anthropogenic relief features and anthropogenically-affected soils, e.g., using remote sensing data, digital elevation models, historic maps or field surveys
- characterizing the specific soil and sedimentological properties, e.g., soil stratigraphy, carbon dynamics, or nutrient availability of land use legacy sites or areas
- studying their effects on plants and ecosystems, e.g., forest cover composition, plant growth rates, or soil microbial communities
- evaluating consequences for land management, e.g. archaeological relevance, heritage value, conservation strategies
By bringing together such studies, the session aims at making a step towards assessing the effects of land use legacies on a landscape scale.