Patrick Roberts is a Research Group Leader and Principal Investigator at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena, Germany. For most of the last decade he has led major research programmes that explore past human occupation and alteration of tropical forests. Patrick is a member of a number of international teams working in tropical environments around the world. He currently holds a prestigious ERC Award that aims to discover how pre-colonial and colonial land-use in the tropics initiated changes in the atmosphere, precipitation amounts, soil erosion, and temperatures on local, continental, and even global scales that have left a legacy we live with to this day.