Black death land abandonment drove European diversity losses

The current prevailing perception is that human impacts on the biological
realm have been overwhelmingly negative. Here, we test this narrative by
considering the consequences for aspects of floristic diversity of the
‘Black Death era’ (1300–1400 CE), where one third of Europe’s population
died within half a decade. Based on evidence from 109 pollen records
spanning the Common Era, we find increasing floristic diversity from 0 CE
to ~1300 CE as human populations increased, followed by rapid and
substantial diversity reductions during the famine- and disease-driven
human mortality events of the ‘Black Death era’. As human populations
recovered following the mortality shock, diversity also recovered. This
repository contains all the code used to investigate and answer these
questions. All data for these analyses are freely available and,
where possible, provided. Where reuse licences prohibit the republishing
of data, citations are provided for the user to download the data. These
analyses are very computationally demanding, and thus intermediate and
output data products have been provided.