Investigate Historic Conditions
Like an organism, ecosystems have the capacity for continual renewal but often require some intervention to assist the process. The primary aim of ecological restoration is to restore the land’s capacity for renewal. Before we can determine proper treatme
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Investigate Historic Conditions If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday. Pearl Buck
Like an organism, ecosystems have the capacity for continual renewal but often require some intervention to assist the process. The primary aim of ecological restoration is to restore the land’s capacity for renewal. Before we can determine proper treatments we must understand the land, how it looked and functioned before its health was impaired. We also need to understand how the health of the land is continuing to be negatively impacted. In this step, we walk you through the techniques and potential sources of information that provide insights into how your land once looked and functioned. The characteristics of ecosystems—structure, composition, and ecological functions—are less familiar to most of us than human physiology and behavior. Still, just as you do not have to be a sociologist or psychologist to understand much about yourself and your relatives, you need not be an ecologist to gain much understanding of how historic conditions have influenced the present state of your land and the ecosystems on it. The present condition of the land reflects its history and the forces that continue to shape it. This was beautifully illustrated by May Theilgaard Watts, with examples from across North America, in her classic
book titled Reading the Landscape.1 We recommend her book as a good introduction to this phase of planning your restoration.
Understanding the Historic Landscape We explore history as a process in planning ecological restoration for the following reasons: • To help explain what you found during the “existing conditions survey and mapping” exercise. • To better understand reasons for the changes in the land. • To explore what can be restored and what is not likely restorable, at least now. Unlike peeling an onion, revealing one layer after another, learning about your land is usually not a systematic, sequential process. With ecosystems, you may discover layers (bits of information) in any sequence. This is more like looking at a circus through a hole in the tent. With little concept of what a circus is, at one moment you see a clown, another you see a couple on a
S.I. Apfelbaum and A. Haney, The Restoring Ecological Health to Your Land Workbook, The Science and Practice of Ecological Restoration, DOI 10.5822/978-1-61091-049-1_2, © 2012 Steven I. Apfelbaum and Alan Haney
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trapeze, or a horse galloping around with a nearnaked lady on board. Looking in the peephole of the tent, whether you see the horses or the elephants will seem random. These glimpses will make little sense at first, until you have studied enough to begin to understand the bigger picture. Our formal education teaches us to look for linear relationships. In school, the lessons and chapters in our books introduced the most basic knowledge first and then layered on more and more details and understandings in subsequent chapters or classes. The linear equivalent of le
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