ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2010
Rapid landscape transformation in South Island, New Zealand, following initial Polynesian settlement.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Natural disturbance impacts on ecosystem services and biodiversity in temperate and boreal forests.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2016Pooled it
- Article
- Overcoming Shifting Baselines: Paleo-Behaviour Reveals Industrial Revolution as Tipping Point.Global change biology · 2025Article
- Growing a community's sense of 'heritage': a former mataī forest from SW Ōtautahi Christchurch and its nitrogen status, 860-1430 CE.Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand · 2025Article
- Fire history and treeline elevation in the Apennines: insights from pedo-anthracological analysis on Monte Cervati, Southern Italy.Frontiers in plant science · 2025Article
- Warming drives dissolved organic carbon export from pristine alpine soils.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Reconstructing colonization dynamics to establish how human activities transformed island biodiversity.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Spread of the cycles: a feedback perspective on the Anthropocene.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Land use, fire and climate contributed to deforestation on the Pacific islands.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Rapid adaptation in a fast-changing world: Emerging insights from insect genomics.Global change biology · 2023Review
- Pastoral agriculture, a significant driver of New Zealand's economy, based on an introduced grassland ecology and technological advances.Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand · 2023Review
- Using metabarcoding and droplet digital PCR to investigate drivers of historical shifts in cyanobacteria from six contrasting lakes.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Reimagine fire science for the anthropocene.PNAS nexus · 2022Article
- Superficially described and ignored for 92 years, rediscovered and emended: Apodera angatakere (Amoebozoa: Arcellinida: Hyalospheniformes) is a new flagship testate amoeba taxon from Aotearoa (New Zealand).The Journal of eukaryotic microbiology · 2021Article
- Evidence of prehistoric human activity in the Falkland Islands.Science advances · 2021Article
- Climate change facilitated the early colonization of the Azores Archipelago during medieval times.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Anthropogenic transitions from forested to human-dominated landscapes in southern Macaronesia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Article
- Conservation of Earth's biodiversity is embedded in Indigenous fire stewardship.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Review
- Anthropogenic evolution in an insect wing polymorphism following widespread deforestation.Biology letters · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans have altered natural patterns of fire for millennia, but the impact of human-set fires is thought to have been slight in wet closed-canopy forests. In the South Island of New Zealand, Polynesians (Māori), who arrived 700-800 calibrated years (cal y) ago, and then Europeans, who settled ∼150 cal y ago, used fire as a tool for forest clearance, but the structure and environmental consequences of these fires are poorly understood. High-resolution charcoal and pollen records from 16 lakes were analyzed to reconstruct the fire and vegetation history of the last 1,000 y. Diatom, chironomid, and element concentration data were examined to identify disturbance-related limnobiotic and biogeochemical changes within burned watersheds. At most sites, several high-severity fire events occurred within the first two centuries of Māori arrival and were often accompanied by a transformation in vegetation, slope stability, and lake chemistry. Proxies of past climate suggest that human activity alone, rather than unusually dry or warm conditions, was responsible for this increased fire activity. The transformation of scrub to grassland by Europeans in the mid-19th century triggered further, sometimes severe, watershed change, through additional fires, erosion, and the introduction of nonnative plant species. Alteration of natural disturbance regimes had lasting impacts, primarily because native forests had little or no previous history of fire and little resilience to the severity of burning. Anthropogenic burning in New Zealand highlights the vulnerability of closed-canopy forests to novel disturbance regimes and suggests that similar settings may be less resilient to climate-induced changes in the future.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.