Collaborative research on the meterological and botanical history of the Indian ocean, 1600-1900.

拟议的网络旨在通过以下方式解决与人为气候变化威胁相关的全球关注感：(a)通过揭示有助于我们了解过去400年气候和环境变化的历史记录，试图填补我们对人为气候变化知识的空白。四个世纪以来，欧洲知识分子对帝国环境的研究产生了大量关于环境的文献资料。利用殖民地进行环境实验，导致南亚、南部非洲、澳大利亚和毛里求斯等岛屿的一些地点成为科学家试图了解、调查和操纵一个充满新民族、物种、环境和疾病的世界的露天实验室。这些来源所包含的关于环境和气候变化的信息很少得到审查。(b)通过设立一个小组，将气候变化和环境历史领域的数据和方法与有关了解印度洋周边环境变化的团体和研究人员汇集在一起，解决全球南方的信息不平衡问题。网络将通过：1；汇集了来自人文科学、社会科学和自然科学的跨学科研究人员，讨论并概念化了一个关于该时期记录的IOW植物科学和气候科学的数据库项目。历史气象学、物候学（研究哪些植物和动物物种在哪个时期生活在哪个地点）孢粉学（研究哪种开花植物的花粉在湖泊沉积物等不同地方保存了多少）等科学既依赖于历史文献证据，也依赖于物理证据。讨论如何将环境变化的实物证据与历史文献证据（如殖民记录、土著知识体系的文献证据和自然资源利用实践）结合起来。我们打算收集和汇总数据的地点是中国、毛里求斯、东非、开普、斯里兰卡、西澳大利亚、东南亚和印度。所研究的区域是印度洋世界（IOW）：这是一个具有重要地缘政治意义的地区，其基础与季风有关，季风是印度洋、印度尼西亚、南中国海和东中国海特有的风和洋流系统。季风对印度洋陆地和社区以及相互联系的水体的影响有助于产生长途贸易，并导致思想、商品和人民的交流。1500年后，欧洲商业帝国的密集海上航行导致了本土知识体系与欧洲思想的进一步互动，形成了近代欧洲独特的环境、社会、经济和文化。CWEH作为英国研究热带环境历史的领先中心，具有独特的地位，这也是它与其他网络（如ACRE和Historic Weather）的联系的结果，这些网络关注1700-2000年期间各种气象数据的转录、数字化和在线发布。我们的专长在热带地区进一步建立了由于我们的合作与丘和自然历史博物馆(NHM)特定的印度记录有关自然历史和参与一个AHRC-sponsored会议2011年3月在班加罗尔南亚历史记录和气候变化导致另一个会议上“植物学气候和帝国”苏塞克斯涉及英国气象局2011年5月,皇家植物园,大英图书馆和自然历史博物馆。

The proposed network aims to address the sense of global concern associated with the threat of anthropogenic climate change by: (a) Attempting to plug the gaps in our knowledge of human induced climate change by uncovering historical records that help us understand climate and environmental change in the last 400 years. European intellectual engagement with the environments of empire over four centuries produced a corpus of documentary sources on the environment. The use of colonies for environmental experimentation resulted in locations in South Asia, Southern Africa, Australia and islands such as Mauritius becoming open-air laboratories for scientists attempting to understand, investigate, and manipulate a world of new peoples, species, environments and diseases. These sources have rarely been examined for the information they contain on environmental and climate change.(b) By redressing the information imbalance in the Global South by creating a group that would bring together data and approaches in the area of climate change and environmental history with groups and researchers concerned with understanding change in the environments on the peripheries of the Indian Ocean.The network will do this by: 1. Bringing together an interdisciplinary community of researchers from the humanities, social sciences and the natural sciences to debate and conceptualise a database project on plant sciences and climate science of the IOW as documented in the records of the period. Sciences such as historical meteorology, phenology (a study of which species of plants and animals were living in which locations during which period) palynology (study of how much of the pollen of which flowering plants has been preserved in various places like lake sediments) depend on both historical documentary evidence and on physical evidence.2. Discussing how to combine physical evidence of environmental change, with historical documentary evidence such as colonial records, documentary evidence of indigenous knowledge systems, and practices of natural resource use. The locations for which we intend to gather and aggregate data are China, Mauritius, East Africa, the Cape, Sri Lanka, Western Australia, South East Asia and India. The region under study is the Indian Ocean World (IOW): an area of primary geo-political importance whose foundations are related to the monsoons, a system of winds and currents unique to the Indian Ocean, Indonesia and South and East China seas. The influence of the monsoon on the land and communities of the Indian Ocean and the inter-connected bodies of water helped to generate long distance trade and and led to an exchange of ideas, commodities and peoples. The intensive maritime voyaging of European mercantile empires after 1500 led to further interactions between indigenous knowledge systems and European ideas resulting in the distinctive environment, society, economy and culture of IOW of the modern period. CWEH is uniquely positioned to do this as a leading centre in the UK working on the environmental history of the tropics and as a result of its links with other networks such as ACRE and Historic Weather concerned with transcribing, digitising and publishing online various sorts of meteorological data for the period 1700-2000. Our expertise in the tropics has been further established as a result of our collaborative work with Kew and the Natural History Museum (NHM) on specific Indian records relating to natural history and our participation in an AHRC-sponsored meeting in Bangalore in March 2011 on South Asian historical records and climate change which led to another meeting on 'Botany Climate and Empire' in Sussex in May 2011 involving the MET office, Kew Gardens, the British Library and the Natural History Museum.