Project description
Mapping millennia of climate and human influence
As the climate changes, ecosystems change with it. Scientists are now working to understand how ecosystems have also been shaped by human activity over thousands of years. The ERC-funded EcoArch project investigates this across the Afrotropics, shedding light on how humans and climate adapted to the landscapes and biodiversity of Africa and Arabia. Bringing together archaeologists, geoscientists and ecologists, the project will gather data on climate, vegetation and wildfires in an environment with tropical forests and desert ecosystems. The findings will provide a detailed picture of how the region’s landscapes have changed over 6 000 years and inform future climate research.
Objective
The growing climate crisis and threats to biodiversity have alerted the scientific community of the need to develop a clearer understanding of what has driven landscape changes and how these have impacted biodiversity and ecosystems. The lack of observationally constrained quantitative estimates of those impacts have led to large differences in the scenarios currently used for climate simulations. Nowhere is this more pressing than in the Afrotropics—a biogeographical region of nearly one billion people who are among the most vulnerable to the effects of global climate change. EcoArch brings together expertise in archaeology, geosciences, evolutionary ecology, and land cover modelling to synergistically address fundamental questions about the relationship between humans and the environment over time by documenting landscape changes in the Afrotropics over the last 6000 years. Combining new analytical tools across large landscapes with long occupation histories, we will exponentially expand the quantity and quality of archaeo-ecological data at five geographically diverse sites in Africa and Arabia. Additionally, we will build and logistically support a large regional network of scientists trained and committed to collecting harmonised palaeoecological data. We will conduct state-of-the-art vegetation and fire modelling to determine the relative importance of climate, wildfire, and human activities on landscape changes in the Afrotropics over the last six millennia. These efforts will result in robust local-, regional- and continental-scale land cover and climate reconstructions with a greatly improved spatial and temporal resolution The precision of the datasets we generate will significantly augment inputs to the Earth System Models used to predict future climate changes. EcoArch will establish a conceptual and methodological path for future archaeo-ecological researchers seeking to disentangle human-climate interactions.
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: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- humanities history and archaeology history
- natural sciences biological sciences ecology ecosystems
- humanities history and archaeology archaeology
You need to log in or register to use this function
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.
-
HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
MAIN PROGRAMME
See all projects funded under this programme
Topic(s)
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.
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.
HORIZON-ERC-SYG - HORIZON ERC Synergy Grants
See all projects funded under this funding scheme
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-2025-SyG
See all projects funded under this callHost institution
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.
0313 Oslo
Norway
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.