Combining Historic and Ecologic Archives to Understand Past Environmental Change

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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.