Recipient organisationUniversity of ExeterSource-published name: University of Exeter
Funding£1.7M
PeriodNov 2023 — Oct 2028
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
The ancient Maya cleared, farmed, and built on tropical forests for thousands of years—and the Bladen Nature Reserve in southern Belize still holds the ecological scars of that history, written in tree DNA and soil charcoal. This project tackles a fundamental gap: no one knows how tropical forests truly recover from different types of human disturbance over long timescales. Existing data covers only decades, not millennia. BLADEN will reconstruct 13,000 years of human-forest interaction by coupling pollen records, charcoal layers, and genomic variation in key tree species with modern biodiversity surveys. The goal is to determine whether natural regeneration can fully restore biodiversity after ancient agriculture, settlement, and resource extraction—or whether some changes are permanent. This is fundamental science with direct conservation consequences. If the research shows that forests rebound completely after certain disturbance types, it strengthens arguments for passive restoration over costly replanting. If it reveals lasting genetic bottlenecks or species losses, it shifts the case toward active intervention. The results will provide baseline data that conservation programmes, land-use planners, and climate policymakers currently lack—data that could reshape how we manage tropical forests across the Americas.
View original technical description
How humans have shaped tropical forest composition and structure, and how biodiversity recovers following human disturbance lacks long-term observations. BLADEN will address this critical knowledge gap by determining anthropogenic impacts on biodiversity in a Mesoamerican tropical forest over 13,000 years. The destruction of tropical forests and loss of biodiversity is one of the greatest challenges humanity faces, threatening essential ecosystem services, including food security, the provisioning of medicines and the regulation of Earth's climate. Developing datasets to understand how humans shaped ecosystems and how biodiversity recovers following disturbance is critical for informed conservation strategies and securing global futures. Despite extensive evidence of past landscape impacts, processes of natural regeneration in response to the type, intensity, and duration of disturbance lack data. BLADEN will fill this knowledge gap. The multidisciplinary 5-year project couples past and modern biodiversity indicators at high spatial and chronological resolution in the Bladen Nature Reserve, southern Belize. The study will assess the influence of the range of past disturbances associated with the ancient Maya and their forebears to determine correlations of past vegetation management with modern forest composition and genomic variation in key tree species. My broad experience and successes leveraging novel proxies of human disturbance in the Neotropics place me in a privileged position to lead this interdisciplinary study. The results of the project will reveal insight into how humans have shaped tropical forests and provide critical baseline data on the effectiveness of natural regeneration to restore biodiversity in response to the range of human disturbances.
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