VENI grant: Looking back to the future: improving historical land use reconstructions for better understanding of the global carbon cycle.

When did human activities trigger global environmental change at relevant scales? And how did these activities such as settlement strategies and agriculture affect land use and land cover, the global carbon cycle and climate? This requires the major task of assembling and integrating various historical and archeological data records and incorporate them in a consistent manner in existing historical land use reconstructions, such as the HYDE database.