An international team of researchers led by Penn State University has received a six-year, $13.88 million grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to explore how human activity, climate change, and wildfires have shaped Africa’s landscapes and biodiversity over the past 6,000 years. The project, called Ecological Archaeologies of the Afrotropics (EcoArch), aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic relationship between people and the environment in the Afrotropics — a biogeographical realm encompassing Africa and the southern Arabian Peninsula.
Penn State’s Associate Professor of Geosciences, Sarah Ivory, emphasized that Africa’s ecosystems are products of millennia of climatic, biological, and human influences. Because humans have inhabited Africa longer than any other region on Earth, the continent offers unique insights into how people and nature have co-evolved. The interdisciplinary EcoArch team, which includes experts in archaeology, paleoecology, evolutionary ecology, and land-cover modeling, seeks to uncover the key drivers of environmental change and identify patterns that can inform future conservation and sustainability efforts.
The project is funded through the ERC’s Synergy Grant program, designed to support collaborative, high-impact research that pushes the boundaries of scientific knowledge. In addition to Ivory, the project’s principal investigators include David Wright and Sanne Boessenkool from the University of Oslo and Sandra Harrison from the University of Reading. The researchers plan to apply advanced scientific methods such as stable isotope analysis, ancient DNA, and AI-assisted pollen identification from lake cores to reconstruct historical land use and climate conditions.
Africa and Arabia today face some of the world’s most severe climate challenges, yet scientists lack detailed data on how past environmental shifts occurred and what factors drove them. EcoArch will generate high-resolution reconstructions of past land cover and climate to improve models predicting future climate scenarios. Ivory noted that the project will also create an unprecedented data network across Africa, enabling faster and more comprehensive analyses of ancient environmental changes than ever before.
By combining cutting-edge technologies and interdisciplinary expertise, the project aims to fill critical gaps in understanding how natural and human systems have interacted throughout history. Ivory’s team, which will receive $3.1 million of the total funding, will focus on developing large fossil pollen datasets from sites across Africa, including Cameroon, Uganda, Malawi, Senegal, and Oman. This work will contribute to creating detailed reconstructions of vegetation change over the past six millennia and help clarify how human activity has influenced — and at times sustained — Africa’s ecosystems through the ages.
