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Contrary to expectations, some human-modified landscapes are considered to sustain both human activities and biodiversity over the long-term. Agroforestry systems are among these landscapes where crops are planted under native shade trees. In this context, ancient agroforestry systems can provide insight into how farmers managed the landscape over time. Such insight can help to quantify the extent to which tropical forests (especially habitat-specialist trees) are responding to local and landscape-level management. Here, we extracted fossil pollen (indicator of past vegetation changes) and macroscopic charcoal (indicator of biomass burning) from four forest hollows’ sedimentary sequences in an ancient agroforestry system in Western Ghats, India. We used a mixed-modelling approach and a principal components analysis (PCA) to determine past trajectories of forest change and species composition dynamics for the last 900 years. In addition, we reconstructed the long-term forest canopy dynamics and examined the persistence of habitat-specialist trees over time. Our results show that the four sites diverged to a surprising degree in both taxa composition and dynamics. However, despite these differences, forest has persisted over 900 years under agricultural activities within agroforestry systems. This long-term analysis highlights the importance of different land-use legacies as a framework to increase the effectiveness of management across tropical agricultural lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identifying the impacts of anthropogenic fires on biodiversity is imperative for human-influenced tropical rainforests because: i) these ecosystems have been transformed by human-induced fires for millennia; and ii) their effective management is essential for protecting the world's terrestrial biodiversity in the face of global environmental change. While several short-term studies elucidate the impacts of fires on local plant diversity, how plant diversity responds to fire regimes over long timescales (>100 years) is a significant knowledge gap, posing substantial impediment to evidence-based management of tropical social-ecological systems. Using wet evergreen forests of the Western Ghats of India as a model system, we discuss the synergistic effects of anthropogenic fires and enhanced aridity on tropical plant diversity over the past 4000 years by examining fossil pollen-based diversity indices (e.g., pollen richness and evenness, and temporal β-diversity), past fire management, the intervals of enhanced aridity due to reduced monsoon rainfall and land use history. By developing a historical perspective, our aim is to provide region-specific management information for biodiversity conservation in the Western Ghats. We observe that the agroforestry landscape switches between periods of no fires (4000-1800 yr BP, and 1400-400 yr BP) and fires (1800-1400 yr BP, and 400-0 yr BP), with both fire periods concomitant with intervals of enhanced aridity. We find synergistic impacts of anthropogenic fires and aridity on plant diversity uneven across time, pointing towards varied land management strategies implemented by the contemporary societies. For example, during 1800-1400 yr BP, diversity reduced in conjunction with a significant decrease in the canopy cover related to sustained use of fires, possibly linked to large-scale intensification of agriculture. On the contrary, the substantially reduced fires during 400-0 yr BP may be associated with the emergence of sacred forest groves, a cultural practice supporting the maintenance of plant diversity. Overall, notwithstanding apparent changes in fires, aridity, and land use over the past 4000 years, present-day plant diversity in the Western Ghats agroforestry landscape falls within the range of historical variability. Importantly, we find a strong correlation between plant diversity and canopy cover, emphasising the crucial role of maintenance of trees in the landscape for biodiversity conservation. Systematic tree management in tropical social-ecological systems is vital for livelihoods of billions of people, who depend on forested landscapes. In this context, we argue that agroforestry landscapes can deliver win-win solutions for biodiversity as well as people in the Western Ghats and wet tropics at large., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)