Behnaz Pirzamanbin

Associate senior lecturer

POLLENOMICS: Decoding the Farming History of Europe Using a Bayesian Approach Combining Compositional Data with a Point Process

Author

Behnaz Pirzamanbein
Eran Elhaik
Anneli Poska
Johan Lindström

Summary, in English

This study uniquely combines advanced continental-scale data from
two distinct sources: pollen-based land cover (PbLC) and ancient DNA
(aDNA), developing a novel statistical model for spatiotemporal reconstructions
of past land use across Europe.
The aDNA data serves as a proxy for human habitation, differentiating
anthropogenic and natural land cover from PbLC reconstruction. This
will be accomplished using a Bayesian hierarchical model that combines
compositional data, Gaussian Markov random fields and point process
models.
This groundbreaking approach gives insights into the environmental
impacts of Holocene human migration and subsistence practices, and
marks a major advancement in understanding human-environmental dynamics
over millennia.

Department/s