IGBP-PAGES Focus 5 Human Impacts on Terrestrial Ecosystems (HITE)
by
John Dearing
Department of Geography, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZT, UK.

The HITE programme, launched in June 2001 at an international workshop in Berne, lies within Focus 5 of the IGBP-PAGES Core Project (http://www.liv.ac.uk/geography/hite). The programme has arisen from the growing awareness of the importance of long environmental records to our understanding of modern and future systems. For terrestrial ecosystems worldwide, few are unaffected by human impact and yet our understanding of their detailed functioning and sensitivity to future climate and human impacts is, for most of them, far from certain. This is most obvious where ecosystem change takes place over timescales that are longer than those normally covered in monitoring programmes. Thus the broad objective of HITE is : 'to inform about the status, dynamics and sustainable management of terrestrial ecosystems, now and in the future, from the study of human-environment interactions in the past.' HITE will address this objective by providing scientific structure and support for scientists engaged in the study of long term human-environment interactions in palaeoecological and other records. HITE will also help to promote and organise the synthesis of information about the long term functioning of ecosystems at the biome or regional level, as output to the wider scientific community and policy makers. HITE retains close links to the other Focus 5 programmes: 'Land Use and Climate Impacts on Fluvial Systems (LUCIFS), and 'Human Impacts on Lake Ecosystems' (LIMPACS), and also to the other IGBP-IHDP Core Project 'Land Use and Land Cover Change (LUCC).

Date received: August 16, 2002

Copyright © 2002 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # caji-58.