Project description
A historical exploration of human impact on the environment
Better understanding historical human impact on the environment is important for today’s resource management planning. The EU-funded DEADSEA_ECO project will shed new light on the role of feedback effects in ecological systems in the past. Bioarchaeological methods will be used to study uniquely preserved material records from the middle and late Holocene settlement sequence (4 500 BCE to 700 CE) of the Dead Sea Ein Gedi Oasis and the contemporary palaeontological assemblages from caves in the surrounding Judean Desert. By bridging aspects of current thinking on ecosystem dynamics and the study of humans’ past, the project will be able to define the role of trophic cascades as an invisible dimension of Anthropocene life in marginal environments.
Objective
This project aims to explore the effects of human settlement intensity on desert ecological community structure, focusing on the hitherto unstudied phenomenon of trophic cascades in antiquity. Its key research question is whether human-induced changes in arid land biodiversity can feedback to affect natural resources important for human subsistence, such as pasture and wood. The role of such feedback effects in ecological systems is increasingly acknowledged in recent years in the biological literature but has not been addressed in the study of human past. The research question will be approached using bioarchaeological methods applied to the uniquely-preserved material record from the middle and late Holocene settlement sequence (approximately 4,500 BCE to 700 CE) of the Dead Sea Ein Gedi Oasis, and to the contemporary palaeontological assemblages from caves located in the surrounding Judean Desert. The proposed research is expected to bridge between aspects of current thinking on ecosystem dynamics and the study of human past by exploring the role of trophic cascades as an invisible dimension of Anthropocene life in marginal environments. The study of the history of human impact on such environments is important to resource management planning across a rapidly expanding ecological frontier on Earth, as climate deterioration brings more people in contact with life-sustaining and sensitive arid land ecosystems.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
31905 Haifa
Israel