As Director of the Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation, Patrick is committed to pioneering and applying multidisciplinary approaches to studying long-term relationships of our species and the Earth system. In particular, he focuses on developing new methodologies and datasets which can be used to study how urban dynamics, trajectories, and networks (and their alternatives) have interacted with land use changes and, in turn, different parts of the Earth system across space and time. This includes combining state-of-the-art approaches in field- and lab-based archaeological science, remote sensing, palaeoecology, history, computational archaeology, and land use modelling.