Philip Iain Buckland

Environmental on‐site records covering the late La Tène culture in the late 2nd century BC and early 1st century AD are rare in southern Germany. On a local level such records could help to address the question if and when a settlement gap occurred in southern Germany between the late La Tène culture in the late 1st century BC and the onset of Roman colonisation in the late 1st century AD. Various scenarios have been proposed, ranging from complete depopulation of some areas to the collapse of primarily larger settlements accompanied by only a partial decline of land‐use intensity, up to a settlement continuity that remains obscured by taphonomic filters and insufficient typochronological resolution. Precisely dated environmental on‐site records covering the beginning of this time period therefore provide crucial evidence. Here, we present a multi‐proxy analysis (macrobotanical remains, palynology, archaeozoology and entomology) of the sediments within a wooden well structure built after 133 BC in the highly fertile Nördlinger Ries area, Bavaria. The initial record reflects nearby settlement activities, including husbandry and agriculture. A secondary use of the structure for processing of nettle is likely. The upper infill layers provide a pollen sequence that shows a rapid decline of taxa related to human activity, accompanied by species indicative of ecological succession on abandoned patches of land. We conclude that settlement activities in this region declined drastically during the 1st century BC. Our results support the hypothesis of regional depopulation in southern Germany prior to the establishment of the Roman province of Raetia.

The stability of vegetation regimes—the temporal persistence of plant assemblages—has fluctuated markedly since the last deglaciation. While climate is the primary driver of long-term vegetation dynamics, the effects of human land use change remain less clear. Here, we analyze global vegetation regime stability over the past 15,000 years using fossil pollen records and assess the impacts of land use type and intensification. Vegetation stability declined during the climatically variable deglaciation, increased in the early to middle Holocene when climate variability dropped, but declined sharply over the past 2000 years despite no increase in climate variability, with continent-specific differences in timing. Intensive agriculture and urbanism had the strongest negative effects on vegetation stability, followed by extensive agriculture and pastoralism, whereas foraging, hunting, gathering, and fishing had minimal impact. These findings suggest that recent declines in vegetation stability are linked to intensified human land use, highlighting the need to conserve natural land less intensively managed ecosystems.

Cultural heritage in Sweden is increasingly at risk from a number of climate change related factors. These include the direct effects of erosion, flooding, landslides, melting permafrost and related threats, but also increasing industrial activity in the Arctic associated with energy production and the extraction of minerals for 'green' technologies. Whilst much of the physical science of climate related threats is well understood, the practical implications at the local and regional level, as well as the hands-on management of these risks has been somewhat neglected. In a recent pilot study we exposed problems in government planning processes, and in particular that even though the general risks and potential consequences are known, Sweden lacks any form of coordinated system for the prioritisation of sites in terms of conservation, protection, documentation or abandonment. On an international level, we also identified a tendency to focus on above ground archaeological remains and high status sites and monuments. Cultural landscapes, preserved organic and palaeoecological archives, and as yet undiscovered sites are, on the other hand, are less frequently studied and often neglected in planning processes.Many important cultural heritage sites and landscapes are in close proximity to, and potentially impacted by, transport infrastructure. As the climate warms, roads in particular are increasing in number and traffic volume in the northern areas of Scandinavia. In cooperation with the Swedish Transport Administration we developed a prototype GIS system for assisting in the evaluation of climate related threats to sites in close proximity to transport infrastructure. Three areas were investigated in more detail, ranging from temperate coastal to sub-Arctic rural settings and including a broad variety of cultural heritage types from prehistoric to historical. Case studies looked at particular secondary risks, including the expanding use road salt, and the use of specific datasets (e.g. historical maps, erosion models). This work exposed not only the potential for using such a system in research and planning, but also a number of issues in the uncritical use of publicly available national databases for transport infrastructure, climate threats, and cultural heritage. For example, the poor spatial resolution of risk maps in the Arctic and the poor locational accuracy of many older archaeological and historical investigations can lead to an incorrect assessment of threats. Similarly, much of the rural north of Sweden is poorly surveyed, and existing predictive models for locating unknown sites are inadequate. There is thus a potential bias between risk assessment in the south and the north, and between urban and rural areas. A clear potential exists for the further development of GIS based models with a greater capacity for visualizing and, to an extent compensating for, variability in the quality of the underlying data.This presentation will show some results and conclusions from these studies, as well as some preliminary findings from ongoing research into the reasons behind problems of implementing strategies for the prioritisation of cultural heritage threatened by future climate change.

The Newly formed Swedish National Infrastructure for Digital Archaeology (SweDigArch) and the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database (SEAD) are positioned at the intersection of environmental research, data science and humanities. They represent a considerable upscaling of archaeological and Quaternary geological databases, combining meticulous data management, collaborative stewardship, advanced online interfaces, and visualization.SweDigArch seeks to enhance the open accessibility of archaeological data from Swedish institutions, unlocking the knowledge embedded in cultural heritage and environmental repositories to facilitate interdisciplinary and international research. At its core, SweDigArch aims to enable data-driven analyses across diverse archaeological, palaeoecological, and related materials, including links to biodiversity and other external data sources. This initiative advances research on the intricate relationships between human societies and their environments over long timescales, empowering scholars to formulate inquiries that contribute not only to historical comprehension but also hold contemporary relevance and prospective implications.In the pursuit of data-driven analyses, SweDigArch focuses on facilitating research which examines past human-environment interactions. Through the analysis of archaeological and recent geological datasets, the project endeavors to stimulate research providing insights into the functioning of socio-ecological systems, identifying historical vulnerabilities and resilience-building factors. This knowledge, in turn, will inform contemporary design, planning, and policy frameworks across various institutional and infrastructural domains, from environmental and cultural impact assessments to assessing risks from future climate change.SweDigArch aims to optimize the utility of Swedish archaeological and palaeoecological data through linked data, open formats, shared vocabularies, and the semantic web. This approach enriches national and international research initiatives and facilitates cross-cultural comparative research, contributing to a broader understanding of global human history.Integral to the collaborative framework is SEAD, an Open Access repository for proxy environmental data, including various archaeological and palaeoecological datasets. Incorporating datasets such as BugsCEP fossil insect data and Swedish data on plant macrofossils, pollen, dendrochronology, geochemistry, and ceramic thin sections, SEAD's evolving functionality now extends to accommodate osteological and isotope analyses, underscoring its role as a dynamic platform for data visualization and semantic networking.Together, SweDigArch and SEAD aim to bridge the divide between academic and contract archaeology, offering a pivotal resource for cultural and environmental historical research, urban planning, and sustainability analyses. These initiatives aspire to become the standard primary data infrastructure for all users of Swedish archaeological information, transcending scholarly circles to encompass fields such as cultural heritage preservation and urban planning. This collaborative endeavor invites active engagement from a diverse user base, fostering a scholarly ethos of openness, data-driven inquiry, and interdisciplinary collaboration to deepen our comprehension of the past and contribute to the sustainable shaping of the future.This presentation will describe the infrastructure and provide examples of its use in the analysis and visualization of interdisciplinary data, including fossil insects, past climate change and human impact on biodiversity and the environment.

The Old Wood in a New Light database project focuses on the digitization and accessibility of the results of dendrochronological samples analyzed and archived at four Swedish university-based tree-ring laboratories at Lund University, Stockholm University, University of Gothenburg, and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Collaboration with the Environmental Archaeology Laboratory and Humlab at Umeå University enables long-term open access to data, raw data, and metadata. In this project, we (1) systematically undertake large-scale entry and open access publication of results from wood samples scientifically analyzed and archived by Swedish laboratories and the associated metadata, into the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database (SEAD; www.sead.se) research data infrastructure, and (2) actively promote the database as a resource for new and ongoing interdisciplinary research initiatives. Including dendrochronological data in SEAD infrastructure allows interdisciplinary studies that combine major scientific and societal questions. Building on a pilot study of construction timber from southern Sweden and adaptation of SEAD digitization workflows, more than 70 000 samples archived at the four dendrochronological laboratories are now being handled in the project. The broad coverage of research networks, stakeholder interaction, and strategic support from the cultural heritage community is guaranteed owing to the ongoing collaboration between laboratories and an established international and multidisciplinary reference group.

Since the last Ice Age ( ca 115 000–11 700 years ago), the geographical ranges of most plants and animals have shifted, expanded or contracted. Understanding the timing, geographical patterns and drivers of past changes in insect communities is essential for evaluating the biodiversity implications of future climate changes, yet our knowledge of long-term patterns is limited. We applied a network modelling approach to the recent fossil record of northwestern European beetles to investigate how their taxonomic and trait composition changed during the past 16 000 years. We found two major changes in beetle faunas 4000–3500 and 10 000–9500 years ago, coinciding with periods of human population growth in the Late Holocene and climate warming in the Early Holocene. Our results demonstrate that humans have affected insect biodiversity since at least the introduction of agropastoralism, with landscape-scale effects that can be observed at sites away from areas of direct human impact.

There is no doubt that anthropogenic global warming is accelerating damage to cultural heritage. Adaptation measures are required to reduce the loss of sites, monuments and remains. However, little research has been directed towards understanding potential impacts of climate adaptation measures in other governmental sectors on cultural heritage. We provide a case study demonstrating that winter road salt, used to reduce ice related accidents, damages historical iron milestones. As the climate warms, road salt use will move north into areas where sites have been protected by contiguous winter snow cover. This will expose Artic/sub-Arctic cultural heritage, including Viking graves and Sami sites, to a new anthropogenic source of damage. Research and planning should therefore include the evaluation of secondary impacts when choosing climate adaptation strategies.

The North Atlantic Biocultural Organization (NABO) community initiated dataARC to develop digital research infrastructures to support their work on long-term human-ecodynamics in the North Atlantic. These infrastructures were designed to address the challenges of sharing research data, the connections between those data and high-level interpretations, and the interpretations themselves. In parallel, they were also designed to support the reuse of diverse data that underpin transdisciplinary synthesis research and to contextualise materials disseminated widely to the public more firmly in their evidence base. This article outlines the research infrastructure produced by the project and reflects on its design and development. We outline the core motivations for dataARC's work and introduce the tools, platforms and (meta)data products developed. We then undertake a critical review of the project's workflow. This review focuses on our understanding of the needs of stakeholder groups, the principles that guided the design of the infrastructure, and the extent to which these principles are successfully promoted in the current implementation. Drawing on this assessment, we consider how the infrastructure, in whole or in part, might be reused by other transdisciplinary research communities. Finally, we highlight key socio-technical gaps that may emerge as structural barriers to transdisciplinary, engaged, and open research if left unaddressed.

Paleobiologists and paleoecologists interested in studying biodiversity dynamics over broad spatial and temporal scales have built multiple community-curated data resources, each emphasizing a particular spatial domain, timescale, or taxonomic group(s). This multiplicity of data resources is understandable, given the enormous diversity of life across Earth's history, but creates a barrier to achieving a truly global understanding of the diversity and distribution of life across time. Here we present the Earth Life Consortium Application Programming Interface (ELC API), a lightweight data service designed to search and retrieve fossil occurrence and taxonomic information from across multiple paleobiological resources. Key endpoints include Occurrences (returns spatiotemporal locations of fossils for selected taxa), Locales (returns information about sites with fossil data), References (returns bibliographic information), and Taxonomy (returns names of subtaxa associated with selected taxa). Data objects are returned as JSON or CSV format. The ELC API supports tectonic-driven shifts in geographic position back to 580 Ma using services from Macrostrat and GPlates. The ELC API has been implemented first for the Paleobiology Database and Neotoma Paleoecology Database, with a test extension to the Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database. The ELC API is designed to be readily extensible to other paleobiological data resources, with all endpoints fully documented and following open-source standards (e.g., Swagger, OGC). The broader goal is to help build an interlinked and federated ecosystem of paleobiological and paleoenvironmental data resources, which together provide paleobiologists, macroecologists, biogeographers, and other interested scientists with full coverage of the diversity and distribution of life across time.

This paper provides insights into the handling of climate change issues related to cultural heritage at different government decision levels dealing with physical planning, and in particular roads. Data are derived from a qualitative analysis of official reports and interviews with local and regional planners in three Swedish regions with contrasting climates. The theoretical lens of Institutional Interplay is applied to an analysis grouped into six themes: Climate threats to cultural heritage, Adaptation measures, Preparedness, Institutional preconditions, Institutional interplay, and Challenges. The results suggest that despite a strong environmental reputation internationally, Sweden is not particularly well prepared for dealing with future climate change impacts on cultural heritage and landscape. The lack of national standards and standardised methods risks regional and sectoral variation in the treatment of similar tasks, a problem which deficiencies in knowledge and continuing education are perpetuating. The degree to which discussions and cooperation occur between divisions within the same authority, between authorities, and in national networks varies considerably. Routines and criteria for prioritisation of cultural heritage mitigation, essential under conditions of limited resources, have yet to have been implemented. We conclude with five recommendations for improving the planning process with respect to climate change risks to cultural heritage.