Project description
How pre-industrial humans in the tropics changed the planet
Humans are causing mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluting oceans, and altering the atmosphere. Various studies have shown that climate change signals started appearing globally as early as the 1830s. Local deforestation can have regional and global feedbacks and 20th-21st century human actions in tropical forests are seen as a key part of the Anthropocene – or the anthropogenic domination of earth systems. The EU-funded PANTROPOCENE project will study the degree to which combined pre-colonial and colonial impacts on tropical forests across the bounds of the former Spanish Empire, particularly across the under-studied region of the Philippine Archipelago, initiated changes to climate, geomorphology and the atmosphere, and whether such feedbacks represent the origins of a pre-industrial Anthropocene and left legacies that societies are still dealing with today.
Objective
Tropical forests are globally recognised as biodiversity hotspots and environments that are crucial for climate regulation, landscape stability, and the carbon cycle. Local deforestation can have regional and global feedbacks and 20th-21st century human actions in tropical forests are seen as a key part of the ‘Anthropocene’ – or the anthropogenic domination of earth systems. It remains an open question, however, as to whether pre-industrial human impacts on these environments had similar earth systems effects. 15th to 18th century European colonial empires drew together long-separated Old and New World ecologies, with implications for species distributions, demography, and land management in the tropics. This followed millennia of indigenous activities with possible regional and global cumulative results. Yet, we have no concrete understanding of how pre-industrial impacts varied spatially and temporally, what they meant for local sustainability, and how they compare to modern human impacts. The PANTROPOCENE Project addresses these questions by taking the Spanish Empire as a frame of reference for using archaeological, historical, and palaeoenvironmental data to build ‘pan-tropical’ spatial characterisations of pre-colonial, colonial, and industrial land-use. Undertaking novel palaeoecological and landscape survey fieldwork in the Philippine Archipelago, the often-neglected centre of the Spanish East Indies, the project will bring new data together with existing records, notably from the Neotropics, to ensure full tropical coverage of the Spanish Empire. The results will be factored into climate, geomorphological, and atmospheric models to determine how changing pre-industrial technology, subsistence, and administration had regional and global feedbacks on occupied human environments, informing understandings of the pace and threat of contemporary land-use changes in the context of endemic Island Southeast Asian biodiversity and the tropics more broadly.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- social sciences sociology demography
- natural sciences biological sciences ecology
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences palaeontology paleoecology
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
ERC-STG - Starting Grant
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2019-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
80539 Munchen
Germany
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.