Ecological Modelling 303 (2015) 42–54 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Ecological Modelling j ourna l h omepa ge: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolmodel Multi-method dynamical reconstruction of the ecological impact of copper mining on Chinese historical landscapes A. Braun a,∗ , H.-J. Rosner a , R. Hagensieker b , S. Dieball c a Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Forschungsbereich Geographie, Rümelinstr. 19-23, 72070 Tübingen, Germany b Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Geographische Wissenschaften, Malteserstr. 74-100, 12249 Berlin, Germany c Alta4, Fleischstraße 57, 54290 Trier, Germany a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 30 March 2014 Received in revised form 16 February 2015 Accepted 16 February 2015 Available online 6 March 2015 Keywords: Agent-based modeling Deforestation Biomass balancing Geosimulation Chinese history Landscape reconstruction a b s t r a c t This study deals with the historical impacts of mining as a result of the economic development in Eastern Asia. It focuses on landscape changes caused by the emerging copper mining industry in China’s south east provinces. Since the ecological aftermath has never been documented in Chinese history, a reconstruction of dynamic landscape processes is performed. A key region for this reconstruction are the mining areas in Yunnan province. This province was the most important supplying region of copper in China during the early and mid Qing dynasty (1725–1855). Predictive modeling of the primary vegetation in combination with dynamic agent-based reconstruct- ions have been performed to analyze and to understand deforestation processes. Therefore a time-discrete balance between biomass removal and renewal has been carried out to characterize different periods of landscape degradation, biodiversity and agriculture. Besides the reconstruction, explanatory and exper- imental results have been compiled to assess the ecological impacts of mining during this period. An ‘Evaludation’ of the model was performed in order to verify the applied concepts and test the integra- tion of data as well as the conclusive generation of results. Our calculations show that while deforestation for mining was severe in the 18th and 19th century, rising populations and agricultural reclamation had a bigger impact on the clearance of forests. In addition, quantitative data for the ecological succession show that deforestation was reduced by up to 75% due to the provision of regrowing biomass. Deforested areas around the mines were either completely destroyed or of high biodiversity due to the abundance of heterogenous vegetation communities within small spaces. Lastly, two extreme scenarios were cal- culated which covered all positive and negative triggers of deforestation. These calculations served as reference data to evaluate model’s quality: our model outputs lie within the range of comparable studies but underestimate the total deforestation reported and yet some uncertainties regarding forest fires and other uses of biomass remain. This study has led to a more holistic understanding of the interactions between copper mining and landscape ecology in Chinese history. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Copper mining was a decisive contributor to the rise of the East Asian economic area since the century. Throughout the history the effects of mining on the natural forests have been severe, but none of those effects have been handed down nor recorded. Today, degraded landscapes with massive soil erosion are common where extensive primary forests must have existed (Li, 2008). The follow- ing research questions are addressed in this study: how did the ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 7071 29 74894. E-mail address: an.braun@uni-tuebingen.de (A. Braun). landscape in copper mining areas change during the Qing dynasty? How big was the relative impact of mining and agriculture on the decline of the primary forest cover? How much did this period contribute to the situation we have today? Which were the main driving forces of landscape degradation and how did succession affect the supply of secondary biomass? Can additional informa- tion about inherent relationships in the system be inferred from the model? Since data on vegetation, agriculture and the effects of mining are extremely scarce, the initial distribution of primary forests was modeled by using a classification tree approach (see Section 2.3). In a second step (see Section 2.4) a time-discrete agent-based model (ABM) has been developed, to take the complex system of http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2015.02.013 0304-3800/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.