While the impacts of modern farming and land use practices on climate and biodiversity since 1900 are well-studied in Western and Central Europe, less is known about the preceding transitional period of the 18th and 19th century. By combining information from both natural and historical archives, this study strives to understand the impacts of 18th century agrarian modernisation on Central European ecosystems. Here we present a multi-proxy palaeoecological study from Egelsee (548 m a.s.l., within the city of Bern, Switzerland) spanning the late Middle Ages to the early 20th century. We use pollen, charcoal, dung fungal spores and spheroidal carbonaceous particles (SCPs) as proxies for vegetation and land use changes as well as radiocarbon wiggle matching for the chronology. Our pollen record suggests a shift from cereal cultivation towards grazing from the 16th century onwards, and from the 18th century towards fertilised meadows for animal husbandry. The pollen-inferred decrease of woods since 1700 quantitatively confirms the historically described timber scarcity in the lowlands of Switzerland, while the positive correlation between climate indices and our pollen-inferred cereal production suggests a certain vulnerability of societies to subsistence crises. From the 1850s, urbanisation rapidly altered the vegetation from an open agricultural landscape to a highly urbanised area, leading to a decline of biodiversity towards the present. This study shows that historically well-documented changes in agricultural practices in livestock farming and fodder production, and later urbanisation, can likewise be reconstructed with palaeoecological approaches. Our interdisciplinary approach provides new insights into how agricultural innovations affected vegetation and ecosystems during the past 500 years.

尽管西欧和中欧对 1900 年以来现代农业和土地利用实践对气候和生物多样性的影响进行了深入研究，但对 18 世纪和 19 世纪之前的过渡时期却知之甚少。通过结合自然和历史档案中的信息，本研究致力于了解 18 世纪农业现代化对中欧生态系统的影响。在这里，我们展示了一项来自埃格尔湖（Egelsee，海拔 548 米，位于瑞士伯尔尼市内）的跨中世纪晚期至 20 世纪初的多代理古生态学研究。我们使用花粉、木炭、粪便真菌孢子和球形碳质颗粒（SCP）作为植被和土地利用变化的代表，以及与年代学相匹配的放射性碳摆动。我们的花粉记录表明，从 16 世纪开始，从谷物种植转向放牧，从 18 世纪转向施肥草甸畜牧业。自 1700 年以来，由花粉推断的森林数量减少，从数量上证实了历史上描述的瑞士低地木材稀缺的情况，而气候指数与由花粉推断的谷物产量之间的正相关性表明，社会在应对生存危机时存在一定的脆弱性。从 1850 年代开始，城市化迅速将植被从开放的农业景观转变为高度城市化的地区，导致目前生物多样性的下降。这项研究表明，历史上有据可查的畜牧业和饲料生产以及后来的城市化等农业实践的变化同样可以用古生态学方法来重建。我们的跨学科方法为过去 500 年来农业创新如何影响植被和生态系统提供了新的见解。