To improve climate models, an international team with the participation of UPF turns to archaeological data

The project, called LandCover6k, offers a new classification system that the researchers hope will improve predications about the planet's future and fill in gaps about its past. .Published in PLOS ONE , the study includes the participation of researchers from the universities of Pennsylvania, Pompeu Fabra and Glasgow, including Marco Madella, ICREA research professor of the Department of Humanities at UPF, who is one of the project leaders. Climate modeling is future facing, its general intent to hypothesize how the planet may look at some later date. Because the Earth's vegetation influences climate, climate models frequently include vegetation reconstructions and are often validated by comparisons to the past, including that of vegetation. Yet often, such models are oversimplified, glossing over or omitting how people affected the land and its cover. Conversely, one of archaeology's main objectives is to uncover as much as possible about these anthropogenic alterations. "Understanding the human impact on the Earth is more than looking at past vegetation.