Historical land-use trajectories for understanding present-day soils and landscapes

Present-day soils and landscapes are shaped not only by current environmental conditions and management, but also by decades or centuries of previous land use. However, this historical context is often missing or represented only at coarse spatial and temporal resolution in contemporary monitoring and modelling.

At the University of Hradec Králové (CETA), we reconstruct long-term land-use trajectories using environmental data, historical cadastral and archaeological evidence. In Central Europe, these sources allow us to trace the continuity and transformation of land use over long periods and at substantially finer spatial detail than many continental or global reconstructions.

This creates two complementary opportunities for collaboration. First, detailed historical evidence can be used to validate, benchmark and locally refine broader historical land-use datasets and models such as HILDA/HILDA+ and LUH2. Second, reconstructed land-use trajectories can be linked with contemporary environmental observations to test whether knowledge of previous land management adds measurable explanatory or predictive value.

Our contribution can include:

• reconstruction of historical land-use and management trajectories,

• validation and local refinement of broader historical land-use datasets,

• GIS integration and historical stratification of study sites,

• integration of historical, archaeological and environmental datasets,

• field sampling and geoarchaeological validation,

• documentation and propagation of uncertainty,

• comparison of historical trajectories with present-day soil, remote-sensing or monitoring data,

• testing whether historical information improves environmental models, site classification or interpretation.

Potential applications include soil organic carbon and carbon farming, soil health and degradation, agricultural resilience, biodiversity and ecosystem monitoring, remote sensing and environmental modelling.

We are particularly interested in partners who already have strong contemporary datasets, monitoring networks, experimental sites or modelling frameworks. Our role would be to provide the long-term historical layer and independently test whether it improves interpretation or model performance.

We are looking for an existing or emerging consortium where we can take responsibility for a clearly defined task or sub-task focused on historical reconstruction, spatial integration and validation.