How climate, Indigenous people, and fire shaped Brazil’s Araucaria Forests through the Late Holocene

For millennia, climate changes and Indigenous peoples have influenced Earth’s tropical and subtropical forests. Their relative importance affects our understanding of these ecosystems’ resilience to current anthropogenic changes, so is subject to intensive research and debate. South America’s Atlantic Forest, a global biodiversity hotspot, has been largely absent from this conversation. Here we focus on one of this region’s most iconic, ancient and threatened formations—southern Brazil’s highland mosaic of Araucaria Forest and Campos grasslands. Using novel integrations of palaeo-data and ecological modelling, we assess how climatic and human drivers shaped these landscapes, often through changes to fire dynamics, over the last 6,000 years. We show that climate changes made significant contributions to Araucaria Forest expansions over the last several thousand years, driven by non-linear responses of fire-forest feedback loops to minor climatic shifts. However, within Araucaria Forest areas that experienced more intense human use and occupation, Indigenous people cultivated crops, modified fire dynamics, and profoundly affected vegetation structure and composition. Our results challenge binary views of climate- versus human-driven past vegetation change. Climate, humans and fire all shaped these landscapes through space and time in complex and interacting ways, all of which must be considered to understand or effectively conserve them.