TERRANOVA: Many voices, one mission: Understanding landscapes together – 10 November 2025
Date: 10 November 2025
Venue: VU Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, room HG-1A-41
Credits: 1 EC
The EU-Horizon 2020 TERRANOVA ITN project has run from 2019-2023. Several publications and PhD studies have been completed in the last period. Next month, TERRANOVA PhD students Alexandre Martinez and Anastasia Nikulina will defend their PhD theses at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Leiden University respectively. To celebrate these graduations, we organise an ARCHON symposium ‘TERRANOVA: Many voices, one mission: Understanding landscapes together’ on 10 November 2025, preceding the public defence of Alexandre Martinez. Both graduations can be attended online as well as on site.
Contents:
A more nuanced understanding of the deep history of our cultural landscapes and the influence of changing human-environment interactions on the current state of the environment is required to develop sustainable ways of dealing with landscape changes in the future. Particularly important for Europe’s landscapes are their relations to long-term history, as much of their cultural identities and values are embedded in their historical development.
The current biodiversity and climate crises require the fostering of a new generation of landscape managers, planners and scientists, who are able to integrate the experimental and deductive lines of reasoning of the natural sciences with the holistic and critical perspectives of the Humanities and Social Sciences, adopting good communication skills to take this knowledge to policymakers and the public. The ITN TERRANOVA has aimed to fill this urgent need, to promote sustainable use and conservation of landscapes. In this symposium on the celebration of two TERRANOVA PhD ceremonies of Alexandre Martinez (10 November 2025 at VU Amsterdam) and Anastasia Nikulina (21 November 2025 at Leiden University) we will hear from many voices in TERRANOVA with the mission to understand landscapes together. We look forward to an integrated program from understanding, rethinking, and redesigning sustainable landscape management.
Programme:
11.30-11.50 Sjoerd Kluiving Introduction TerraNova ITN, overview symposium and introduction to TERRANOVA MOOC “Integrated Landscape Analysis (ILA): Addressing Biodiversity and Climate Crises”
11.50-12.30 From reconstructing to rethinking landscapes
11.50-12.10 Alexandre Martinez Learning From The Past To Balance Nature And Culture In The Evolution Of Iberian Atlantic Landscapes: understanding energy regimes in geoarcheology
12.10-12.30 Marco Davoli (online) Macro-scale perspectives on past and potential future megafauna across Europe and their ecological impacts
12.30-13.15 Lunch
13.15-14.30 From rethinking to redesigning landscapes
13.15-13.35 Frank Arthur (online) Modelling and characterization of climate, environment, and human impact during the Holocene and Eemian using an Interactive Physical Downscaling
13.35-13.55 Anhelina Zapolska Modelling land cover change in Europe over current and past energy regimes: the combined effects of climate and anthropogenic activities on the development of European landscapes
13.55-14.15 Sjoerd Kluiving TerraNova: Natural ecological baseline evolution from deep history to the present inform the urgency of current and future landscape management towards inclusive landscape transformations
14.15-14.30 Synthesis discussion with all speakers and Q&A with the audience
14.30 end of Symposium
(break)
15.45- 17.00 PhD ceremony Alexandre Martinez ‘Learning From The Past To Balance Nature And Culture In The Evolution Of Iberian Atlantic Landscapes: An Energy Regimes Perspective‘ (livestream can be found here)
17.00-18.00 Reception PhD ceremony, drinks and bites
Preparatory reading:
Roebroeks W et al. (2021). Landscape modification by Last Interglacial Neanderthals.Sci. Adv.7,eabj5567(2021). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abj5567
Nikulina A et al. (2021). Tracking Hunter-Gatherer Impact on Vegetation in Last Interglacial and Holocene Europe: Proxies and Challenges. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-021-09546-2
Martinez A, Zapolska A, Arthur F, Verhagen P, Kluiving S, Muñoz-Rojas J, Borja Barrera C, Fraile Jurado P (2024). Identifying major phases in the use of land, energy and changing landscapes by agrarian societies (7,000 cal BP-Present) in Cantabrian Spain, based on cultural changes and anthropogenic signals. Front. Environ. Archaeol. 3:1339172. https://doi.org/10.3389/fearc.2024.1339172
Quintero-Uribe LC, Navarro, LM, Pereira, HM, Fernández, N (2022). Participatory scenarios for restoring European landscapes show a plurality of nature values. Ecography, 2022: e06292. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.06292
Segar J, Callaghan CT, Ladouceur E et al. (2022) Urban conservation gardening in the decade of restoration. Nat Sustain 5, 649–656. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00882-z
If you have trouble finding or getting access to these papers, please contact secretary@archonline.nl.
Credits: ARCHON members can receive 1 EC for attending the conference and handing in a standard report which includes in-text references to the preparatory reading listed above. If needed to incorporate all the required reading, the report may be up to 2500 words. Send your report to secretary@archonline.nl.
Registration: CLOSED
