Historical Detectives at Work

Image: Watercolor map of the Tijuana River, courtesy of Stamen Designs

By Rachel Powell
B.S. Biology, 2013
Summer Intern at 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.

It is hard to believe that my summer internship at the San Francisco Estuary institute is over, or that I managed to accomplish so much in just 10 weeks. I worked on several ongoing projects during my time at SFEI this summer, one of which I mentioned in my last post—a study on the extent of tidal influence in Bay Area creeks, which I participated in by helping with field work and writing a literature review for the final report. I also collected and read sources for the Tijuana River historical ecology study, wrote parts of a historical ecology report on the north San Diego county lagoons, went on a site visit to the John Muir National Monument in Martinez, CA (soon to be the subject of a historical ecology study), and mapped coastal waterways for the South Coast wetland change analysis.

The Historical Ecology team at SFEI works on a number of projects at any given time, some which are very large and span several years (San Diego lagoons, Tijuana River), and others which are on a much smaller time scale (John Muir, Novato Creek). During my internship I had the opportunity to participate in nearly all of their current projects, doing a wide range of tasks which gave me a sense of how the typical historical ecology study progresses from start to completion. They first gather a wide range of historical documents and current scientific research relevant to their study area, then use these sources to build a textual description of what the historical landscape looked like. In addition, they use historical maps, past and current aerial imagery, and photographs to map with a high degree of certainty where different habitat types existed 200 years ago, and where they are found today.

This summer I had the opportunity to visit archives (including Stanford Special Collections), photograph old maps and postcards, and decipher sources written in both English and Spanish, to pick out any relevant ecological information which could be used to build a picture of what the landscape looked like when the first Spanish explorers arrived. I sifted through a wide variety of sources, such as excerpts from the diaries of Spanish explorers as they passed through the Tijuana River valley, early Southern Pacific railroad maps, the memoirs of those who grew up swimming in the San Diego lagoons, countless letters sent from John Muir to his friends and family, and some rather sensational newspaper clippings describing a series of catastrophic floods.

I love this type of historical detective work—diving into an overwhelming sea of information and trying your best to ignore all the fascinating but not-all-that-relevant bits, while making sure not to overlook anything that could be used to build a snapshot of the study area’s past ecological landscape. It was a challenging task which I was constantly trying to improve at, but by the end of the summer I think I had a decent grasp on what kind of information was relevant, and had learned a lot about California’s rich environmental history along the way.

During my summer at SFEI, I gained a snapshot of what it is like to work for a nonprofit, and what other types of work I could apply my ecology degree to other than academia. I eventually want to go on to graduate school with a more focused idea of what area of ecology I am interested in. My internship has helped to broaden the possibilities rather than narrow them, and I am seriously considering a career in the environmental nonprofit sector in the future. Many thanks to the San Francisco Estuary Institute and the Bill Lane Center for the American West for granting me the opportunity to spend my summer learning just what it means to do historical ecology.

Read more at the Out West Blog for Summer Interns »