Macarena Cárdenas

• PhD
• Senior Sustainability Advisor at UKGBC

O sul do Brasil tem uma presença de longa duração das sociedades Jê, os atuais Kaingang e Xokleng. Estes povos criaram paisagens compostas por uma diversidade de lugares e espaços de coexistência e circulação com diferentes funcionalidades, que interagem entre si por meio de uma estrutura sociocosmológica própria. Ao longo de mais de 2000 anos de h...

Nas terras altas do sul do Brasil, uma expansão antropogênica da floresta ocorreu em detrimento dos campos entre 1410 e 900 cal anos AP, coincidindo com um período de mudança demográfica e cultural na região. Estudos anteriores debateram as contribuições relativas ao aumento das condições climáticas mais úmidas e quentes e as modificações humanas d...

As escavações no sítio Abreu Garcia oferecem um estudo de caso detalhado de um conjunto de recintos e montículos funerários utilizados pelos grupos Jê meridionais nas terras altas do sul do Brasil. A descoberta de dezesseis depósitos secundários de pessoas cremadas dentro de um único montículo permite uma discussão profunda dos aspectos espaciais d...

Informação Suplementar do capítulo "Separando Fatores Humanos e Climáticos na Mudança de Vegetação do Holoceno Tardio no Sul do Brasil"

In 2022, as part of UKGBC's role as an Accelerator to the UN-backed Race to Zero campaign, we launched our Collaboration Cafés. The events brought groups of UKGBC members together to discuss their organisation's progress on the road to net zero. Conversations in small groups allowed for insights on goals, strategies, and challenges to be openly sha...

Trees provide a wide range of benefits for agriculture and farmers, with the potential to increase economic returns and support agricultural resilience. Planting more trees on farms can address multiple policy goals, including the UK’s aim to become carbon neutral by 2050 and the overhaul of the UK agricultural policies to a better, fairer and sust...

Trees participate in mitigating the urban heat island phenomenon thanks to their transpiration and shading. This cooling potential is highly dependent on leaf area. Nevertheless, leaf traits potentially vary across different land management practices in urban settings, thereby challenging the models used to estimate thermal budgets. The present stu...

Rapid, low-cost methods for large-scale assessments of soil organic carbon (SOC) are essential for climate change mitigation. Our work explores the potential for citizen scientists to gather soil colour data as a cost-effective proxy of SOC instead of conventional lab analyses. The research took place during a 2-year period using topsoil data gathe...

Nature-based solutions (NbS) provide direct benefits to people who live in areas where these approaches are present. The degree of direct benefits (thermal comfort, reduced flood risk, and mental health) varies across temporal and spatial scales, and it can be modelled and quantified. Less clear are the indirect benefits related to opportunities to...

Urban green spaces are often promoted as nature-based solutions, thus helping to mitigate the negative effects of climate change. Estimating the potential environmental benefits provided by urban green space is difficult because of inconsistencies in management practices and their heterogeneous nature. Collecting data across such a spectrum of cont...

Green Infrastructure is a nature-based-solution with the potential of mitigating the harmful and even deadly consequences of climate change and urbanisation in our urban areas. In particular, urban trees provide us with multiple ecosystem services, such as storm water control, carbon sequestration, soil health and temperature regulation. When suppo...

This research is investigating the trade-offs between the multiple ecosystem services of trees Trees are naturally sustainable as circular systems, providing multiple ecosystem services to mitigate and adapt to climate change Urban trees are nature-based solutions that provide us with multiple ecosystem services, such as stormwater control, carbon...

Southern Brazil's highland Araucaria forest is ancient, diverse and unique, but its future is under significant threat from 20th Century habitat loss and 21st Century climate change. Paleoecological studies have revealed that it expanded rapidly over highland grasslands around 1000 years ago, but whether this expansion was caused by human land use...

Our cities are increasingly impacted by climate change and growing urban populations. These changes are rapidly modifying urban environments, with knock-on effects on health and quality of life. In many cities, ecosystem functioning and services have been heavily compromised, requiring urgent action from actors in all sectors, public, corporate, ac...

In the highlands of southern Brazil an anthropogenitcally driven expansion of forest occurred at the expense of grasslands between 1410 and 900 cal BP, coincident with a period of demographic and cultural change in the region. Previous studies have debated the relative contributions of increasing wetter and warmer climate conditions and human lands...

Cities are becoming increasingly populated and overwhelmingly difficult to understand and manage, a situation exacerbated by the rapid detrimental effects of climate change and urbanization. There is urgent need to develop new institutional, technical and social tools to help mitigate the impacts of, for example, extreme heat and flooding events th...

One of the less well-understood problems in paleoscience is the role of climate as a modulator of long-term changes in human demography, and, in turn, how changes in human demography influence climate because demography also determines how individuals choose to modify ecosystems. Our workshop compared the long-term interaction between climate, huma...

Excavations at Abreu Garcia provide a detailed case study of a mound and enclosure mortuary complex utilised by the southern proto-Je in the southern Brazilian highlands. The recovery of 16 secondary cremation deposits within a single mound allows an in-depth discussion of spatial aspects of mortuary practice. A spatial division in the placement of...

One of the least understood aspects of paleoscience is the role of climate in controlling long-term human population, and, in turn, how changes in population influence the strategies that individuals use to manage resources. Understanding the nexus between climate, human population and the management of resources is important in a world where clima...

Palaeoecological research can provide important insights into the impacts of humans vs climate change upon ecosystems in the past, which can inform land-use and conservation planning. Our international project aims to reveal past dynamics of the iconic Araucaria forest in the context of land use by the pre-Columbian Jê culture in southern Brazil ov...

Across Latin America the uncovering of impressive archaeological sites, often underlying dense forest, show evidence of past human impact within what are often viewed as pristine ecosystems. Intercontinental comparison of studies shows that anthropogenic impacts were spatially heterogeneous and it is often argued that modern floristic composition i...

O presente texto apresenta as questões centrais de pesquisa do projeto Paisagens Jê do Sul do Brasil e também traz resultados preliminares do primeiro ano de atividades de pesquisa em Arqueologia e Paleoecologia. Palavras-chave: Jê do Sul; Arqueologia; Paleoecologia; Interdisciplinaridade Abstract: This paper presents the main research issues of J...

The late-Holocene expansion of the Tupi–Guarani languages from southern Amazonia to SE South America constitutes one of the largest expansions of any linguistic family in the world, spanning ~4000 km between latitudes 0°S and 35°S at about 2.5k cal. yr BP. However, the underlying reasons for this expansion are a matter of debate. Here, we compare c...

We present palaeoecological results from an interdisciplinary project, which seeks to understand the relationship between late Holocene expansion of Araucaria forest, climate change, and land use by the pre-Columbian (pre-1492) Jê culture in southern Brazil. Previous palaeoecologial studies in the southern highlands of Brazil (Iriarte & Behling 200...

There is increasing concern regarding the future of the iconic, but threatened Araucaria forest in southern Brazil in the face of pressures from climate change and the devastating consequences of human land-use. In order to comprehend the effects of these drivers over the Araucaria forest by looking at the long term history with fossil pollen recor...

A long held view about the occupation of southern proto-Jê pit house villages of the southern Brazilian highlands is that these sites represent cycles of long-term abandonment and reoccupation. However, this assumption is based on an insufficient number of radiocarbon dates for individual pit houses. To address this problem, we conducted a programm...

Ceramic types per floor in House 1. (PDF)

Attributes of the ceramic types identified in House 1. (PDF)

Lithic raw material per floor in House 1. (PDF)

Lithic data from House 1. (PDF)

Lithic assemblage for each floor of House 1. (PDF)

OxCal model specification. (PDF)

Ceramic data from House 1. (PDF)

Protecting endangered vegetation is a common topic in current times. Nevertheless, there is still uncertainty regarding the best steps needed to be taken to protect them. Here we show evidence of past land use and interaction with native vegetation by pre-Columbian societies and discuss both the potential of learning from this information and using...

The Araucaria Moist Forest of southern Brazil is a unique ecological mosaic, dominated by the 'Parana pine' (Araucaria angustifolia), an iconic 'living fossil', dating back to the Mesozoic era. This forest comprises part of the Atlantic Forest, a global biodiversity hotspot with exceptionally high levels of endemism. Unfortunately, after centuries...

Around AD 1000, the southern Brazilian highlands witnessed a convergence of phenomena: climatic change, the abrupt expansion of Araucaria forest and the appearance of large pit-houses and monumental mound and enclosure complexes, which signal fundamental socio-political and ideological change amongst southern proto-Jê (SPJ) groups. These developmen...

Understanding the purposes and associations of burial monuments and sacred built landscapes in the Formative period of the Americas is an important research goal among archaeologists. A key step that can help us to better understand the social and spatial organisation of these cultures is determining the ecological and environmental characteristics...

Inter-bedded volcanic and organic sediments from Erazo (Ecuador) indicate the presence of four different forest assemblages on the eastern Andean flank during the middle Pleistocene. Radiometric dates (40Ar–39Ar) obtained from the volcanic ash indicate that deposition occurred between 620,000 and 192,000 years ago. Examination of the organic sedime...

Arqueólogos que estudam o período Formativo nas Américas e o Neolítico no Velho Mundo há muito tempo estão preocupados com o estudo das funções econômicas, sociais e ideológicas associadas ao surgimento de monumentos funerários e da criação de paisagens sagradas construídas. Tradicionalmente, o debate centrou-se em como esses processos refletem mud...

Puyasena et al. question our interpretation of climate-driven vegetation change on the Andean flank in western Amazonia during the middle Pleistocene and suggest that the use of Podocarpus spp. as a proxy of past climate change should be reassessed. We defend our assertion that vegetation change at the Erazo study site was predominantly driven by c...

A reconstruction of past environmental change from Ecuador reveals the response of lower montane forest on the Andean flank in western Amazonia to glacial-interglacial global climate change. Radiometric dating of volcanic ash indicates that deposition occurred ~324,000 to 193,000 years ago during parts of Marine Isotope Stages 9, 7, and 6. Fossil p...

Amazonia is one of the most biodiverse areas of the world and its vegetation plays a crucial role in controlling the global climate through the regulation of the levels of atmospheric CO2. However, Amazonian ecosystems and their role in the climate system are threatened by ongoing the human impact (already estimated loss of 60% of the species in we...

RESUMEN Este trabajo presenta los resultados de una investigación arqueológica conducida en la cuenca del río Cisnes (~44° S), valle que atraviesa diversos ambientes del oeste de Patagonia, desde las los límites occidentales de la estepa hasta los canales del Pacífico. Éstos se ponderan a la luz de una reconstruc-ción paleoambiental que se extiende...

This paper presents results on archaeological research conducted at the Cisnes river basin (similar to 44 degrees S), valley which passes through several environments in western Patagonia, from the westernmost limits of the steppe to the Pacific channels. These are assessed in light of a palaeoenvironmental reconstruction spanning from the Late Ple...

Much of the ongoing controversy regarding synchrony or bipolar asynchrony has centered on the timing and structure of temperature changes during the Last Glacial Interglacial Transition (LGIT) in the southern mid- latitudes, in particular the Patagonian region (40°-56°S) of South America. South America is the only continuous continental landmass in...