Historical ecology

Historical ecology is a research program that focuses on the interactions between humans and their environment over long-term periods of time, typically over the course of centuries. In order to carry out this work, historical ecologists synthesize long-series data collected by practitioners in diverse fields. Rather than concentrating on one specific event, historical ecology aims to study and understand this interaction across both time and space in order to gain a full understanding of its cumulative effects. Through this interplay, humans adapt to and shape the environment, continuously contributing to landscape transformation. Historical ecologists recognize that humans have had world-wide influences, impact landscape in dissimilar ways which increase or decrease species diversity, and that a holistic perspective is critical to be able to understand that system.

Piecing together landscapes requires a sometimes difficult union between natural and social sciences, close attention to geographic and temporal scales, a knowledge of the range of human ecological complexity, and the presentation of findings in a way that is useful to researchers in many fields. Those tasks require theory and methods drawn from geography, biology, ecology, history, sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines. Common methods include historical research, climatological reconstructions, plant and animal surveys, archaeological excavations, ethnographic interviews, and landscape reconstructions.

The discipline has several sites of origins by researchers who shared a common interest in the problem of ecology and history, but with a diversity of approaches.Edward Smith Deevey, Jr. used the term in the 1960s to describe a methodology that had been in long development. Deevey wished to bring together the practices of "general ecology" which was studied in an experimental laboratory, with an "historical ecology" which relied on evidence collected through fieldwork. For example, Deevey used radiocarbon dating to reconcile biologists’ successions of plants and animals with the sequences of material culture and sites discovered by archaeologists.

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