The enduring legacy of the ancient Maya on tropical forests

Understanding processes shaping tropical forests is critical because they underpin biodiversity and essential ecosystem services. While modern land use is transforming tropical landscapes at an unprecedented scale, growing evidence supports a deeper human legacy where past land uses reshaped successional trajectories, leaving lasting ecological imprints on forest composition and structure. In the tropical forests of Central America, the ancient Maya civilisation persisted for over two millennia, supporting vast urban, settlement, and agricultural systems. Lidar surveys reveal the massive scale and intensity of this landscape engineering, yet the ecological consequences remain understudied. Here, the vegetation component of lidar data—typically overlooked in archaeological applications—is correlated with human features across an old-growth tropical forest in northern Belize. We show that ancient Maya intensive land use features have significant correlations to modern forest structure metrics. Rather than exhibiting a homogenous signature, relict Maya wetland field complexes, settlements, and upland walls are each associated with a specific suite of forest structural metrics, reflecting distinct long-term ecological legacies of these land-use systems. These findings demonstrate that ancient infrastructure, despite centuries of abandonment, continues to influence ecological trajectories and patterns of forest development, even in old-growth tropical forest.