Understanding forests of the past helps to understand current forest ecosystems and how they may change in the future. In many forests, however, historical information is limited and it is difficult to assess the impact of loss of species on forest ecosystem structure and function. Historical landscape paintings may be a valuable source of information about the past, as they present color images that pre-date photography. These pictures may offer a way to explore past changes in forest structure that relate to current patterns in forest productivity and ecosystem function. However, the use of these images in historical ecology has been hampered by questions of image validity: How truly accurate are the images portrayed in these paintings? How much of an image is an artist?s manipulation of a scene to best illustrate a message, allegory, or romanticized view of nature? The proposed interdisciplinary project uses tools and knowledge from humanities and ecological sciences to address these concerns. The main objective is to assess how to mine forest paintings by nineteenth-century American artists as a potential data set for historical ecology. This project also represents a rare deep integration of approaches from science and humanities and has the potential to serve as a model for how crossing of disciplinary boundaries may have high value to society.
This project joins the expertise of art scholars (who understand how and why nineteenth-century landscape images were created) with the expertise of scientists (who understand the structure and function of forest ecosystems). Research will focus on images and forests in the northeastern US from the nineteenth century. This was an era in which the forest landscape was rapidly transforming, and during which the popularity of landscape painting ? particularly as practiced by the so-called Hudson River School ? was simultaneously exploding. With historic and ongoing land use changes coupled with historic (and ongoing) species losses, northeastern forest landscapes are an ideal place to explore forest change over the past two centuries. Most historic records for this region, while extensive in some regards, generally tell us little about forest structural dynamics, stand regeneration dynamics, or community composition and natural disturbance rates. An interdisciplinary research approach exploring forest ecology and art history in tandem can help us understand historic ecosystems and how the representation of forested landscapes affects modern concepts of wilderness and nature.
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.
