Historical Methods for Environmental Baselines with Thomas Lekan and Carol Boggs, University of South Carolina and Loren McClenachan, University of Victoria
How have historical methods supported the reconstruction of populations, community structures, and landscape features? Environmental baselines serve as reference points for restoration, conservation, and policy efforts, and our January session will call into question the best practices for historical research projects that stand to impact species survival, climate change resiliency, and the integrity of ecosystems. Our first speaker, Loren McClenachan, asks how historians can better partner with scientists to develop rigorous archival and applied methods to support understandings of environmental change. As the Canada Research Chair of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria, McClenachan specializes in the development of historical baselines of for marine animals, including marine fish, turtles, and mammals. Her papers rely heavily on secondary sources and also engage with historical photographs, newspaper articles, and restaurant menus to document and quantify historical change. These results have links to marine conservation and management, and her work also addresses the implications of and pathways for using historical data in policy contexts. Our second speaker, Thomas Lekan, is Professor of History and Associate Professor of Earth, Ocean & Environment at the University of South Carolina. As a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Lekan advised the group "Baselining Nature" and wrote the introduction for the subsequent special issue of E Nature and Space. Lekan will team up with his colleague Carol Boggs, who focuses on the conservation biology of native butterflies. As Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of South Carolina, Boggs uses historical documents as data sets and has co-taught courses on the intersection of historical methods and conservation biology.
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