Life Sciences Commons^™

Combining Environmental History And Soil Phytolith Analysis At The City Of Rocks National Reserve: Developing New Methods In Historical Ecology, Lesley Morris

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Historical ecology is an emerging and interdisciplinary field that seeks to explain the changes in ecosystems over time through a synthesis of information derived from human records and biological data. The methods in historical ecology cover a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. However, methods for the more recent past (about 200 years) are largely limited to the human archive and dendrochronological evidence which can be subject to human bias, limited in spatial extent or not appropriate for non-forested systems. There is a need to explore new methods by which biological data can be used to understand historic vegetation …