Open Conference Systems, Nordic Geographers Meeting 2011

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Reconstruction of historical agricultural land in Sweden
Beibei Li

Last modified: 2011-02-11

Abstract


Land use and land cover change induced by human activities have emerged as a “global” phenomenon with Earth system consequences. Since the industrial revolution, the pace, magnitude and spatial reach of human alterations of the Earth’s land surface were unprecedented over the last hundreds years. Agriculture land as the greatest increased type of human land use attracts much notice. Global historical cropland and grazing land datasets have been established and were used widely for quantitative analysis of environmental effects of land use change. There are some uncertainties of global data accuracy on regional lever. Regional and local study of land use reconstructions are important supplement to regional environmental change research and global dataset improvement. In this study, historical arable land and meadow of Sweden are reconstructed using statistic data and old maps since 1865. This data is spatial explicitly with resolution on municipality lever. In recent 150 years, the arable land experienced intensive growth, largely as a result of the strong population increase in the same phase. The area of arable land reached peaks during 1930s. There are different growth curves of arable land and meadow in different regions which show the agriculture development diversity influenced by natural conditions.