Yesterday the latest issue of PAGES magazine, a journal published by the Past Global Change Initiative, came out. The issue, edited by Marie-José Gaillard-Lemdahl, Nicki Whitehouse, Marco Madella, Kathy Morrison and Lucien von Gunten, is focussed on 'Past Land Use and Land Cover' and is a product of the LandCover6K working group. There will be another entry (soon) on the aim of this working group, the importance of include archaeological data in the reconstruction of past land use and why this is important for the world at large.

Here I just want to highlight that one of the papers in the issue can be considered the seed from where RAINDROPS has started. Authored by Stefano Bagetti, myself, Andrea Zerboni, Donatella Usai and Marco Madella, it briefly introduces instances of rain fed agriculture throughout the Sahara in arid to hyper arid contexts and give a glimpse of the work that we carried out in Sudan and that inspired us to develop RAINDROPS.

The paper is open access and can be downloaded for free from the PAGES magazine website. However, to make life even simpler you can find the PDF here. As the article was written before the project was awarded, ERC is not mentioned in the acknowledgements (actually the article does not even have an acknowledgement section). However, I am going to be bold here and consider it the first scientific product of RAINDROPS! As such, you will also be able to find it in the project repository once it is up and running.

The issue is really interesting and full of great and diverse contributions and I recommend that anyone interested give it a look. Let me just leave you here the papers by a current and a former fellow members of CaSEs research group: the first one if from Umberto Lombardo and colleagues on Mapping pre-Columbian land use in Amazonia and the second from Enrico Crema (Bell et al.), with the collaboration of Marco Madella, on Simulating vegetation in ancient Japan through a pollen-based modelling approach.