Combining Historic and Ecologic Archives to Understand Past Environmental Change

该项目将研究过去的环境变化和人类活动的相对影响。 研究人员将通过比较几个世纪以来记录农业和土地管理的书面历史记录与使用附近湖泊沉积物重建的植被变化的物理记录，来考虑是什么特定的社会经济条件导致了当地的生态变化。将生态数据与历史文本相结合，可以确定社会活动导致长期环境变化的时间。人们日益认识到，现代生态系统反映了几个世纪以来人类和生态进程的结果。该项目将提供对当今决策者的深入了解，这些决策者负责制定更好的战略，以应对生活在不断变化的环境中的挑战。研究人员将通过应用一种新的地球化学方法来创造一个新的和更详细的环境历史，为科学的进步做出贡献。该项目包括一个历史学家和物理科学家团队，并将支持一名研究生和两名麦克奈尔学者的教育。麦克奈尔奖学金计划是一个联邦计划，为传统上代表性不足的群体成员在高等教育中获得研究技能，更好地准备在高等教育的潜在职业生涯。该项目检验了这样一个假设，即生态突变与人类社会经济变化的历史关系比与环境变化的关系更密切，而且这些变化在同一政府控制下跨越广泛的地理区域。将利用放射性碳年代测定的湖泊沉积物岩心中的花粉、非花粉孢粉和木炭分析来重建沉积物的变化，这些沉积物岩心具有非常高的沉积速率，可以与历史数据进行比较，从而获得年代分辨率。历史的叙述将来自广泛的法律的宪章可以追溯到公元650年。研究人员还将使用多方法开发一种新的高分辨率降水重建方法，通过分析湖泊沉积物碳酸盐和纤维素中的氧和碳同位素，分析叶蜡残留物中的氢同位素，并测试花粉中的碳同位素是否可用作降水代用品。本研究以意大利卢卡附近的一个案例为研究对象，因为这个城市保存了1,300年的宪章和法律的文件，记录了从罗马中央集权税制到分散的政治和经济制度，再到原始资本主义城邦，最后到现代社会的关键过渡时期的土地使用历史。这项研究将通过确定过去在不同社会经济结构下实施土地管理决策的例子，为有兴趣提高美国森林复原力的管理人员提供新的见解和方法。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得支持通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估。

This project will examine past environmental change and the relative influence of human activities. The investigators will consider what specific socioeconomic conditions produced local ecological change doing this by comparing multiple centuries of written historical records documenting agriculture and land management with physical records of vegetation change reconstructed using sediments from nearby lakes. Combining ecologic data with historical texts permits identification of times when societal activities resulted in long-term environmental change. There is increasing recognition that modern ecosystems reflect the results of centuries of human and ecological processes. This project will offer insight into present-day decision makers charged with developing better strategies for responding to the challenges of living in a changing environment. The investigators will contribute to the advancement of science by applying a novel geochemical method to create a new and more detailed environmental history. The project includes a team of historians and physical scientists and will support the education of a graduate student and two McNair scholars. The McNair scholar program is a federal program for members of traditionally underrepresented groups in higher education to gain research skills and better prepare for a potential career in higher education. This project tests the hypothesis that abrupt ecologic change is more closely associated with the history of human socioeconomic change than environmental change, and that these changes extend across broad geographic regions under the same governmental control. Ecologic change will be reconstructed using pollen, non-pollen palynomorphs and charcoal analysis from radiocarbon dated lake sediment cores with very high sedimentation rates that allow for a decadal chronological resolution that can be compared with historical data. Historical narratives will come from extensive legal charters dating back to 650 AD. The investigators will also develop a new high-resolution precipitation reconstruction using a multi-method approach by analyzing oxygen and carbon isotopes from lake sediment carbonates and cellulose, analysis of hydrogen isotopes in leaf wax residues and testing whether carbon isotopes from pollen can be used as a precipitation proxy. This study will investigate this question by considering a case study near Lucca, Italy because this city preserved 1,300 years of charters and legal documents recording land use history across a critical transitional period from the Roman centralized taxation system, into a decentralized political and economic system, then to proto-capitalist city states and finally up to the modern society. The research will provide new insights and approaches to managers interested in increasing forest resilience in the United States by identifying past examples in which land management decisions were implemented under different socioeconomic structures, which resulted in altering land use practices and creating new ecologic states that in some cases led to permanent environmental change.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.