About the LandUse Working Group

The Land Use Working Group (a LC6K Project) is an international and interdisciplinary research group dedicated to reconstructing human land use over the past 10,000 years. The goal of this initiative is to critically evaluate and improve models of anthropogenic land cover change used in local and global climate models.

This work is urgently needed. Current climate models make little use of the vast repository of evidence about human history, an awareness that humans are one agent of global change. Vegetation is known to change in response to many factors, including human land use, but the complex and variable relationships between land use and land cover are still insufficiently understood. Differing assumptions about these relationships have led to significant differences between models of anthropogenic land cover change, a critical shortcoming with immediate scientific and policy implications for work on global climate.

The development of more accurate and complete historical land use and land cover maps will also support and fuel research into a wide variety of fields and thus is of interest well beyond the community of climate scholars.

The Land Use Working Group, based at the University of Pennsylvania, is a direct contributor to LandCover6k, a working group of PAGES (Past Global Changes). Founded in 1991, PAGES is a core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP). The inclusion of the historical human disciplines makes the The Land Use Working Group effort unique in the world of large-scale international scientific collaborations.