Data and code from: Pre-industrial land-use limits contemporary shrub encroachment in the French Alps

Shrub encroachment has become a global phenomenon in recent decades. While global warming in the Arctic is often cited as the primary cause, human-managed mountain regions have experienced intense historical land-use that may also play a considerable role. Shrub encroachment has significant implications for biodiversity, carbon storage, and transformation of mountain landscapes. However, disentangling between the effects of present-day environmental conditions and historical land-use trajectories in explaining present-day shrubland distribution remains challenging. We use early 19th-century land registry records — rare historical sources documenting past land-use and vegetation cover — to assess whether these legacy conditions influence present-day shrub distribution. By combining these archive data with dendrochronological sampling and a diachronic analysis of shrub expansion based on historical aerial photographs, we provide a comprehensive analysis of shrub colonisation. Our results ..., , # Data and code from: Pre-industrial land-use limits contemporary shrub encroachment in the French Alps

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.wpzgmsc3t](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.wpzgmsc3t)

## Description of the data and file structure

Data and codes for producing the figures in the article ‘Nicoud et al. 2026 - Pre-industrial land-use limits contemporary shrub encroachment in the French Alps’. There is an .Rdata file containing the data, an .R file for preparing the data, one for the libraries, one for each figure in the main manuscript, and one for the supplementary figures.

First, run the data preparation script that will process the data from the .Rdata file. Then you can run the scripts for each figure independently. The code is fully annotated to explain each step of the script. The scripts required for the different stages of the analysis can be run directly from the main file using the `source()` function.

### Files and variables

#### File: Data_preparation.R

**Description:** s..., ,