Reconstruction of climatic and socio-economic impacts on the landscape of Northern Tuscany (Italy) over the last 2000 years based on palaeoecological and historical evidence

Both climate and human activity play a role in ecosystem change, and studies examining the relationship between climate, society and the environment need detailed data from all three sources. Too often, the historical archives used in such studies are not from the exact location and period as the paleoecologic and climatic data. We analyze one of the oldest and most complete set of medieval Italian records of land use and compare that with a new paleoecologic reconstruction from Lucca, Tuscany, and independent records of climate reconstructed from tree-rings and speleothems to identify causal factors of landscape change when comparing climate, society and environment over the last 2000 years. We identified three environmental periods of abrupt permanent vegetation change at times of both climatic and societal change: (1) The early 7th century following the end of the Late Antique Little Ice Age and the structuring of Lombard society in the wake of the Roman Empire; (2) The early 11th century associated with the Medieval Climate Anomaly but also new institutional land tenure rights; (3) The early 15th century, following the Black Death and coinciding with the Little Ice Age as well as the early Renaissance. For each period we found that while climate may have played some role in human actions, environmental change was most clearly explained by new societal structures controlling land use. We argue for additional local studies with in-depth historical records to create more nuanced explanations of the complex relationship between society, climate and environmental change. A network of studies across a region would help develop more convincing long-term causal connections between climate, society and environmental impacts.