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Uncoupling human and climate drivers of late Holocene vegetation change in southern Brazil
In the highlands of southern Brazil an anthropogenitcally driven expansion of forest occurred at the
expense of grasslands between 1410 and 900cal BP, coincident with a period of demographic and
cultural change in the region. Previous studies have debated the relative contributions of increasing
wetter and warmer climate conditions and human landscape modifcations to forest expansion, but
generally lacked high resoltiuon proxies to measure these efects, or have relied on single proxies to
reconstruct both climate and vegetation. Here, we develop and test a model of natural ecosystem
distribution against vegetation histories, paleoclimate proxies, and the archaeological record to
distinguish human from temperature and precipitation impacts on the distribution and expansion of
Araucaria forests during the late Holocene. Carbon isotopes from soil profles confrm that in spite of
climatic fuctuations, vegetation was stable and forests were spatially limited to south-facing slopes
in the absence of human inputs. In contrast, forest management strategies for the past 1400 years
expanded this economically important forest beyond its natural geographic boundaries in areas of
dense pre-Columbian occupation, suggesting that landscape modifcations were linked to demographic
changes, the efects of which are still visible today