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.
This research was designed to determine how wetlands were perceived, used, and managed in the colony of New Netherland between initial Dutch settlement ca. 1620 and national-scale wetland drainage by 1840. The purpose was to determine the colonial-era value of wetlands and if any similarities could be identified between New Netherland and other northeastern colonies with similar agricultural histories and natural resources. In order to understand the bigger picture and provide a local example he research was divided into two parts: one large-scale and archival, the other a laboratory based case-study in Kinderhook, NY. Understanding the geographic occurrence of wetland perception, use, and management is important because colonial-era value of wetlands was much greater than historians have typically believed. Results indicate that wetlands were essential in colonial-era farming by providing much of the hay and pasture needed to sustain livestock, as well as thatching material. Tidal marshes were valued for provision of both salt and fresh hay, as exemplified by the attached 1676 Staten Island map that labels areas according to the types of hay provided. Mowing, ditching, burning, and grazing of many wetland types appear commonplace in all northeastern settlement areas. The results of the Kinderhook case-study showed that Dutch settlers did indeed graze livestock on a non-tidal, alder-dominated, floodplain wetland (see attached graphs). Some wetlands were valuable enough to be sought in their own right, independent of adjacent upland; this is illustrated by the attached 1686 map showing two wetlands surveyed for an Ulster County, NY farmer. However, although the Dutch may have been pioneers in wetland engineering in Europe—and diking was widely practiced in the Bay of Fundy and Delaware Bay—diking was not common in the colony of New Netherland. A small population focused on the fur trade, and natural lack of large marshes, likely prevented the practice from catching on in the greater Hudson River Estuary. The introduction and adoption of European forage and fodder species that could be grown on drier ground occurred locally and was often unrecorded. However, farmers throughout the Northeast were exposed to the idea of planting upland grasses and legumes and draining or infilling their wetlands with the advent of the agricultural press after 1810. The timing of introduction and adoption of European forage and fodder species (like clover and Timothy) is not sufficiently discrete to separate the Dutch from other settlement groups, but the general trend indicates that European species began to replace native wetland herbage in the late-18th C. The 19th-C. devaluation of wetlands, manifested in widespread drainage and in-filling, has long been assumed the result of new drainage technologies, cheaper labor, increasing urbanization, and disease. The results of this research now tie devaluation to the substitution of wetland herbage with introduced upland European species. Northeastern North America has witnessed a cycle of wetland valuation, from agricultural necessity to wasteland and now as scenic habitats that provide ecosystem services with identified economic value. Other impacts of this research include demonstrations on the utility of new laboratory techniques and proxy records in tracing wetland change over time. Specifically, phytoliths (a plant microfossil) are now known to provide essential information on vegetation types in alder peats that do not otherwise preserve pollen or plant fragments. Furthermore, the unique phytolith signature of an invasive reed was discovered to clearly indicate the introduction of that plant in temperate wetlands where establishment dates and dispersal rates are in question. The use of X-ray fluorescent (XRF) spectroscopy in determining the rise in peat lead content is an emerging dating technique, and its success in this project suggests that time and money can be saved if XRF is used as a dating tool.
