Europe

The Black Death killed more than a third of Europe's population in the 14th century, and new research shows that as farmland was abandoned, plant biodiversity plummeted by about 40 percent. But the loss was temporary: within 150 years, as populations recovered and human disturbances returned, biodiversity climbed back to slightly above pre-plague levels. The study, published in Ecology Letters, reveals that medieval farming practices, far from being uniformly harmful, created patchwork landscapes that sustained a rich variety of plants.