Of multiple ways to assess the geography of the early Anthropocene, three ongoing efforts are establishing the extent, intensity, and chronology of human impacts on landscapes and connecting impacts to global change through greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes. Landscapes interact with GHGs, and these have global climate implications. LiDAR, capable of precisely mapping through forest gaps, has revolutionized our ability to characterize and quantify humanized landscapes. In many cases, though, LiDAR is only as good as its accompanying ground verification. This article forges these together to compare a mature literature on wetland contributions to the early Anthropocene in Asia through methane from paddy rice agriculture with the growing literature on a large area of wetland agriculture in the Americas, focusing on the newest discoveries in Central America. Several studies have linked the ∼20 ppm rise in atmospheric CO₂ from ∼7000 to 1000 BP with deforestation for global farming; the 100 ppb rise in CH₄ from ∼5000 to 1000 BP with wetland farming; and the 7 to 10 ppm decline in CO₂ in the sixteenth century CE with reforestation and population collapses of the Americas after the European Conquest. We synthesize the evidence for the onset, duration, and impacts of wetland agriculture in the Maya Lowlands of Mesoamerica to compare their impacts on GHGs and, thus, their contributions to global impacts on climate. This article builds from three decades of studying neotropical humanized landscapes and wetland agroecosystems and more recent quantification from ground-verified LiDAR imagery and synthesizes this growing research and the challenges ahead to gauge the early Anthropocene.

在评估早期人类世地理的多种方法中，正在进行的三项工作是确定人类对景观的影响的程度，强度和时间顺序，以及通过温室气体（GHG）通量将影响与全球变化联系起来。景观与温室气体相互作用，并且具有全球气候影响。LiDAR能够精确地绘制出森林中的空白，从而彻底改变了我们描述和量化人性化景观的能力。但是，在许多情况下，LiDAR的性能仅与其随附的地面验证一样好。本文将这些研究结合起来，以比较成熟的关于湿地通过水稻农业产生的甲烷对亚洲早期人类世的贡献的文献，以及有关美洲大范围湿地农业的文献的增长，重点是中美洲的最新发现。₂从~7000至1000 BP与毁林全球养殖; 湿地耕作使CH ₄的100 ppb从约5000 BP升高到1000 BP。在公元16世纪，随着欧洲的征服，美洲的植树造林和人口崩溃，CO ₂下降了7至10 ppm 。我们综合了中美洲玛雅低地湿地农业的发生，持续时间和影响的证据，以比较它们对温室气体的影响，从而比较它们对全球气候变化的贡献。本文基于对新热带人性化景观和湿地农业生态系统研究的三十年经验，以及来自经过地面验证的LiDAR图像的最新量化结果，综合了这项不断发展的研究以及为衡量早期人类世而面临的挑战。