A main area of Ralph’s research is the development of pollen-landscape calibration datasets for the quantification of past land cover and application to conservation and climate change. Co-ordinating data on European land cover change over the past 10,000 years, the research was used to trace human migrations across Europe and changes in vegetation following the onset of farming landscapes. This led to the discovery that human activity was already responsible for significant changes in the continent’s landscape by the Bronze Age, and that these began as the earliest farming communities as Neolithic populations spread across Europe.

Communities and governments around the world have recognised the scale of environmental damage caused to ecosystems by human actions. Calls for climate action have resulted in government policies to try to mitigate the worst impacts and halt, or even reverse, the damage that has been caused.  

Read more about the how the restoration of our ecosystem is not so straightforward. 

Looking at past ecological change, Ralph provides evidence to inform current and future conservation efforts in the UK. His work on peatland archaeology has been used to drive change in how cultural heritage is considered within peatland restoration programmes. Archaeological assessment and mitigation is now becoming routine, at least within the South West. He is now using the toolkit of environmental archaeology to assess the ecological consequences of moorland improvement schemes in the South West, particularly peatlands which are critical to preventing and mitigating the effects of climate change as the largest terrestrial carbon store.

Read more about Professor Ralph Fyfe