Researchers have found that plant biodiversity across Europe collapsed in the centuries following the Black Death pandemic, as human populations declined and farmland was abandoned.
The finding overturns a long-standing expectation that nature rebounds when people withdraw from landscapes shaped by centuries of farming.
Black Death, pollen, and plants
Across lakes and peatlands in Europe, preserved pollen grains record which plants once grew in the surrounding counattemptside before and after the plague.
Analyzing more than 100 such records, Jonathan Gordon at the University of York documented that plant diversity dropped sharply once fields were deserted and traditional land management stopped.
The decline persisted for roughly 150 years after the pandemic before plant diversity launched rising again as human populations slowly returned.
This pattern suggests the disappearance of everyday farming practices reshiftd the ecological conditions that had supported many European plant species.
Why plant diversity declined
Once plowing, grazing, mowing, and cutting stopped, open ground closed and forests spread across former working land.
With forests spreading, patchiness, a landscape built of many compact habitat types, shrank and fewer habitats meant fewer plants could persist.
Woodland often holds many species overall, but a spreading canopy can crowd out the flowers and herbs that thrive in open edges.
Europe’s post-plague decline was severe becautilize the old mix of field margins, pastures, ponds, and scrub stopped being maintained.
How farms assisted
Before the plague, plant diversity had climbed for more than a thousand years as agriculture spread into new ground.
Medieval farming usually worked as a mixed system, with crops, woods, rough grazing, and uncultivated strips packed toobtainher.
Those landscapes created light, shade, wet spots, and disturbed soil in close quarters, giving different plants room to coexist.
Seen over centuries, people were not just reducing nature there, they were also creating conditions that supported more plants.
A patchy pandemic
Black Death mortality varied sharply across Europe, even though overall estimates still place the death toll near one-third to one-half.
Places hit hardest by abandonment saw the sharpest plant losses, while areas with steady cultivation did not collapse in the same way.
Earlier pollen work had already connected those regional differences to different levels of land abandonment and farm survival.
Seen against that backdrop, the new paper explains why a single story about Europe’s empty counattemptside never held.
Recovery took centuries
Plant diversity did not bounce back quickly after the first wave of plague passed through Europe in the mid-1300s.
Roughly 150 years of decline followed, and recovery launched only as people returned to fields and regular work resumed.
“We only started to see a recovery once human populations rebounded and agricultural activity resumed, a process that took roughly 300 years to return to pre-plague levels,” declared Gordon.
Recovery stayed slow, suggesting biodiversity depconcludeed on repeated human actions rather than simple abandonment alone.
Reconsidering rewilding today
Rewilding, reducing direct management so landscapes recover with less human control, often promises richer ecosystems after human retreat.
This study argues that the promise can fail in places where prized species depconclude on mowing, grazing, or compact-scale farming.
For Europe, rerelocating people from every working landscape may protect some wild habitats while erasing others formed alongside people.
Still, rewilding does not fail as an idea, it only loses the promise that absence alone restores diversity.
Landscapes worth keeping
European officials call some species-rich working landscapes High Nature Value farmland, a label for farming still closely tied to biodiversity.
Here, that idea matters becautilize it treats certain farms as living habitats, not land waiting to become empty.
Spanish dehesas and Portuguese montados survive on that balance, mixing trees, pasture, and production instead of separating them.
Those systems matter becautilize they reveal the paper’s lesson is not nostalgic, it still fits landscapes people utilize now.
Where farming harms
A recent review found that intensive farming harms biodiversity through simplified land and heavy inputs.
Large monocultures, huge fields planted with one crop, reshift edges and shelter even when people remain everywhere.
Pesticides, fertilizer, and intensive soil disturbance add pressure that medieval mixed farming did not create at that scale.
Crucially, the new Black Death paper defconcludeed low-intensity mosaics, not the modern expansion of simplified agriculture.
The patchwork answer
Across the landscapes at issue, conservation worked best when several land utilizes shared the same ground.
Gordon explained that preserving the wide range of biodiversity historically associated with European landscapes requires a patchwork landscape, where crops, woodlands, pastures, ponds, and lakes coexist within the same environment.
Crops, woodland, pasture, ponds, scrub, and lightly utilized margins each support different plants becautilize each modifys light, moisture, and disturbance.
Managing that mosaic is harder than enforcing one rule, but the study suggests Europe pays when variety disappears.
The Black Death turned abandoned land into a centuries-long test, and the result undercuts a comforting story about plants and empty landscapes.
For modern conservation, the harder tinquire is deciding where to step back and where careful human care still keeps diversity alive.
The study is published in Ecology Letters.
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