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The ‘Black Death’ or deadly bubonic plague that swept across Europe between 1347 and 1353, did not lead to a ‘pristine’ landscape where diverse varieties of plant life flourished, a new study by the University of York in the United Kingdom has found.
The pandemic wiped out up to one half of the continent’s population. As there were no humans, farms, villages and fields were abandoned, leading to what is known as a historic ‘rewilding’ event.
One would expect that such a landscape would be almost akin to a ‘Garden of Eden’. But new research by scientists at the University of York found that this was not necessarily the case.
The researchers examined plant diversity in the centuries before and after the Black Death and found that biodiversity declined significantly in the 150 years following the pandemic, according to a statement by the University.
“As farmland was abandoned, traditional land management practices ceased and forests spread. Rather than driving an increase in plant biodiversity, biodiversity plummeted. We only started to see a recovery once human populations rebounded and agricultural activity resumed — a process that took roughly 300 years to return to pre-plague levels,” Jonathan Gordon, Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of York’s Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, was quoted by the statement.
Many modern environmental theories suggest that human activity is inherently damaging to biodiversity. The findings of the study, published in the journal Ecology Letters, challenge that idea.
Simply removing people does not directly lead to healthier or more diverse ecosystems. Instead, the researchers argue that many of the plant species valued today depend on long-term human disturbance, such as farming, grazing and land clearance.
“The conclusions may have implications for contemporary conservation strategies, particularly the growing ‘rewilding’ movement, which often promotes the withdrawal of human activity from landscapes to enable nature recovery,” noted the statement.
“Our work offers a more nuanced perspective on the relationship between humans and nature, indicating that biodiversity and human land use do not have to be in conflict. In many cases, they actually depend on one another,” it quoted co-author Chris Thomas, also at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity.
Jonathan Gordon added: “To maintain the many different types of biodiversity that have been associated with European ecosystems over the last few millennia, we have to take a ‘patchwork approach’, where we have a mosaic of crops, woodlands, pastures, ponds and lakes and so on, co-existing in the same landscape.
“It is true that humans can go too far, and we have seen that with extensive crop monocultures and overgrazed landscapes, but we have models where a good balance has been achieved between humans and biodiversity — for example in the Iberian dehesas and montados, as well as Alpine pastures and Hungarian Tanya — so we know it is possible.”