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Quantifying Ancient Maya Land Use Legacy Effects on Contemporary Rainforest Canopy Structure

Hightower, Jessica, Butterfield, A., Weishampel, John·2014·Remote Sensing
DOI 10.3390/rs61110716
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Abstract

Human land use legacies have significant and long-lasting ecological impacts across landscapes. Investigating ancient (>400 years) legacy effects can be problematic due to the difficulty in detecting specific, historic land uses, especially those hidden beneath dense canopies. Caracol, the largest (~200 km2) Maya archaeological site in Belize, was abandoned ca. A.D. 900, leaving behind myriad structures, causeways, and an extensive network of agricultural terraces that persist beneath the architecturally complex tropical forest canopy. Airborne LiDAR enables the detection of these below-canopy archaeological features while simultaneously providing a detailed record of the aboveground 3-dimensional canopy organization, which is indicative of a forest’s ecological function. Here, this remote sensing technology is used to determine the effects of ancient land use legacies on contemporary forest structure. Canopy morphology was assessed by extracting LiDAR point clouds (0.25 ha plots) from LiDAR-identified terraced (n = 150) and non-terraced (n = 150) areas on low (0°–10°), medium (10°–20°), and high (>20°) slopes. We calculated the average canopy height, canopy openness, and vertical diversity from the LiDAR returns, with topographic features (i.e., slope, elevation, and aspect) as covariates. Using a PerMANOVA procedure, we determined that forests growing on agricultural terraces exhibited significantly different canopy structure from those growing on non-terraced land. Terraces appear to mediate the effect of slope, resulting in less structural variation between slope and non-sloped land and yielding taller, more closed, more vertically diverse forests. These human land uses abandoned >1000 years ago continue to impact contemporary tropical rainforests having implications related to arboreal habitat and carbon storage.

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  • Impacts of past activities on modern forest structures near ancient settlements are long-lasting and may influence current estimates of tropical forest composition.

    “These studies show that the impacts of past activities on modern forest structures near the location of ancient settlements are long-lasting, to the extent that they may influence our current estimates of forest composition in tropical forests, such as the Amazon7,8, the eastern flank of the tropical Andes6, and the neotropical forests of Central America9–11.”

    From Ecological legacies of pre-columbian settlements evident in palm clusters of neotropical mountain forests (2026) · cites this paper as [11]

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Metadata

Authors
Hightower, J., Butterfield, A., & Weishampel, J.
Venue
Remote Sensing
Publisher
MDPI AG
Published
2014-11-06
Volume
6
Issue
11
Pages
10716-10732
ISSN
2072-4292
DOI
10.3390/rs61110716
Cited by
53
References
1
Language
en
Licence
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (vor)
Funders
NASA Space Archaeology Program (NNX08AM11G)

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