Maps of Future Past: Understanding California’s Historical Ecology

Image: A historical map (cropped), drawn in 1901, of the Tijuana Estuary between the border of California and Mexico.

By Alexandra Peers
M.S. in Earth Systems, 2015
Summer Intern at the San Francisco Estuary Institute

Read about our summer interns on the Out West student blog. Throughout the summer, the Center's interns and Research Assistants will be sending in virtual postcards, snapshots and reports on their summer work.

Whenever I tell people I'm interning at the San Francisco Estuary Institute, they usually ask, "What does SFEI do?" When I tell them that I'm working at SFEI researching the historical ecology of California, they always ask, "Wait, what's historical ecology?" Before starting my internship, I had a theoretical idea of what historical ecology meant - looking at the ecological patterns of a historical environment and seeing how landscapes functioned in the past - but as to what actually went into researching historical ecology, I wasn't so sure. Finishing up my 4th week at SFEI, I'm now starting to have more of a concrete answer to that inevitable "historical ecology?" question.

SFEI's work is split up into three major programs: Clean Water, Environmental Informatics, and Resilient Landscapes. I'm the intern specifically for Resilient Landscapes, and most of my work falls within the research area of "historical ecology" within the department. The Resilient Landscapes team researches a variety of past environments, from the San Joaquin River to the San Francisco Delta region, to understand the environmental history of these places. They then shares that research with policy makers and environmental managers, to help them create better future environmental policies.

So far, I've gotten to work a variety of projects, all mostly at the starting or ending stages of their timelines, as one of my goals for the summer is to get a general idea of the different types of projects SFEI works on and to collaborate with a variety of staff members from Resilient Landscapes. My work has focused on mostly textual and online research, looking through historical documents, including diaries, letters, and particularly maps, to see how the explorers and surveyors wrote about the natural environment. I've used GIS, a geographic mapping and analysis tool, for a number of assignments as well. A favorite project of mine so far has been researching the Tijuana Estuary - I had no idea that the Tijuana Valley, spanning both the US and Mexico, is home to one of the largest intact wetland areas in the region - investigating whether the inlet was open or closed in the past 150 years. I read through diaries and interviews by old explorers from the 18th century and farmers from the 19th, and looked at historical maps and surveys of the area, to see if the inlet had been drawn as closed or open. The convenience of GPS and Google Maps made me marvel at the old T-sheets of the region, or topographic maps, just realizing how much work must have gone into going out, surveying, and mapping the whole estuary.

I'm excited to continue exploring historical ecology research this summer, as well as work on some of SFEI's outreach and communication projects, such as designing a museum exhibit on historical ecology. I can't believe I only have six more weeks left of the internship, but here's to making the most of them!

Read more at the Out West Blog for Summer Interns »