In the 1300s, a plague emptied many of Europe’s farms. Scientists were surprised at what grew back.
It might seem like a win for nature: a pandemic that wiped out huge chunks of Europe’s population in just six years. Abandoned villages, untended fields, woods reclaiming former farmland. That must have left room for plants and wildlife to thrive, right?
But a new study published in Ecology Letters by researchers at the University of York’s Leverhulme Center for Anthropocene Biodiversity suggests the opposite actually happened. The study found that the human population crash in Europe during the Black Death caused a crash in plant biodiversity, which remained low for about 150 years.
When people disappeared, so did plant variety
The Black Death spread throughout Europe from 1347 to 1353, killing one third to one half of the population of the continent, with some cities losing up to 80 percent of residents, the authors of the study wrote in The Conversation. To find out what happened to plant life after this, researchers analyzed pollen preserved in mud from more than 100 lakes and bogs across Europe. Centuries later, the pollen grains settle into sediment layer by layer. This creates a sort of timeline of which plants were growing in a given area.
In Ecology Letters, the study found that plant diversity in Europe increased gradually from around year 0 to 1300, reaching its peak just before the plague. Then, the same study says that diversity plummeted after 1348 and remained low for some 150 years. According to the University of York's summary of the findings, it took roughly 300 years for biodiversity to recover to pre-pandemic levels.
