Doctoral Dissertation Research: Informing Environmental History with Historical Ecology: Agricultural Wetlands in New Netherland, 1620-1840

在殖民时代之后，毗连的美国已经失去了一半以上的原始湿地。剩余的湿地作为稀有物种的栖息地、水过滤、防洪和其他生态系统服务具有很高的价值。湿地的功能与生物群有关，但与森林和早期演替栖息地的研究不同，过去农业的环境遗产通常没有被考虑在湿地研究中。在北美殖民地，湿地经常被大量利用。美国混合畜牧业农业系统作为本地干草的来源，但它们作为遗留的农业生态系统研究不足。此外，在长期定居的东北地区，那里对干草的需求很大，湿地也很普遍，大多数关于殖民地农业的研究只关注新英格兰和新法国的文化发源地。由于荷兰人在新荷兰定居的时间短，缺乏书面记录，新荷兰被忽视了，因此，在冰川覆盖的大西洋美洲的殖民土地利用历史上存在地理空白，对该生物物理区域的湿地植被变化的了解也不完整。这个博士论文研究项目将结合历史和代理记录来记录殖民时期荷兰农业及其对纽约哈德逊河谷和长岛西部湿地植被的影响。图像、地图、植物标本室记录和殖民地文本将用于定位农业湿地，并解释它们的使用、管理和引进欧洲高地牧草物种后的农业放弃。这些信息将为使用古生态技术确定湿地农业对荷兰代表性地区植被的影响的案例研究提供背景。沉积物样本从一个已知的农业湿地将进行地层学分析的植物大化石，植物岩，木炭，和有机物质。加上已知的基准日期，至少10个加速器质谱仪（AMS）放射性碳日期将提供一个高分辨率的时间线，用于分析殖民时期和早期美洲时代的土地利用和植被变化。通过使用新翻译的荷兰殖民记录，该项目将有助于加深对北美荷兰殖民经历和遗产的了解。新荷兰在地理和生物地理上的位置与新英格兰和新法国相似，这表明荷兰人、英国人和法国人的活动应该一起考虑，以创造一个区域尺度的景观变化环境史。传统的古生态技术的应用和一种新兴的方法（植物岩分析）的结合对生物地理学家和生态学家有潜在的更广泛的影响，他们对扩展东北和温带其他地区湿地的历史记录感兴趣。因为植物岩可能是水文不稳定环境中植被变化的唯一可用代用记录，如农业湿地，在历史记录中很少有描述，也很少有其他代用记录。作为博士论文研究改进奖，该奖项还将提供支持，使有前途的学生建立一个强大的独立研究生涯。

The contiguous United States has lost more than one-half of its original wetlands after the Colonial Era. The remaining wetlands are highly valued as habitat for rare species, for water filtration, for flood control, and for other ecosystem services. Wetland function is related to biota, but unlike studies of forests and early successional habitats, the environmental legacies of past agriculture have generally not been considered in wetlands research. Wetlands often were intensively used in colonial North America?s mixed-husbandry agriculture system as sources of native hay, but they are understudied as relict agroecological systems. Furthermore, in the long-settled Northeast where demand was great for hay and where wetlands are common, most research on colonial agriculture focused only on the cultural hearths of New England and New France. New Netherland is overlooked because of the short duration of Dutch settlement and paucity of written records, and as a result, there is a geographical gap in colonial land-use history for glaciated Atlantic America and incomplete understanding of wetland vegetation change in that biophysical region. This doctoral dissertation research project will use a combination of historical and proxy records to document colonial Dutch agriculture and its impact on vegetation in wetlands of New York's Hudson River Valley and western Long Island. Images, maps, herbarium records, and colonial texts will be used to locate agricultural wetlands and explain their use, management, and agricultural abandonment following introduction of upland European forage species. This information will provide context for a case-study using paleoecological techniques to identify the impact of wetland agriculture on vegetation in a representative Dutch area. Sediment samples from a known agricultural wetland will be stratigraphically analyzed for plant macrofossils, phytoliths, charcoal, and organic material. Together with known benchmark dates, at least ten accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) radiocarbon dates will provide a high-resolution timeline within which to analyze land-use and vegetation change during the colonial and early American eras.By utilizing newly-translated Dutch colonial records, this project will contribute to a growing understanding of the Dutch colonial experience and legacy in North America. The location of New Netherland within a physiographic and biogeographic province similar to New England and New France suggests that Dutch, English, and French activities should be considered together to create a regional-scale environmental history of landscape change. The application of traditional paleoecological techniques and incorporation of an emerging method (phytolith analysis) has potentially broader impacts for biogeographers and ecologists interested in extending the historical record for wetlands in the Northeast and elsewhere in temperate latitudes, because phytoliths may be the only available proxy record of vegetation change in hydrologically unstable environments like agricultural wetlands that are rarely described in the historical record and yield few other proxy records. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career.