Abstract
This paper presents the results of a consensus-driven process identifying 50 priority research questions for historical ecology obtained through crowdsourcing, literature reviews, and in-person workshopping. A deliberative approach was designed to maximize discussion and debate with defined outcomes. Two in-person workshops (in Sweden and Canada) over the course of two years and online discussions were peer facilitated to define specific key questions for historical ecology from anthropological and archaeological perspectives. The aim of this research is to showcase the variety of questions that reflect the broad scope for historical-ecological research trajectories across scientific disciplines. Historical ecology encompasses research concerned with decadal, centennial, and millennial human-environmental interactions, and the consequences that those relationships have in the formation of contemporary landscapes. Six interrelated themes arose from our consensus-building workshop model: (1) climate and environmental change and variability; (2) multi-scalar, multi-disciplinary; (3) biodiversity and community ecology; (4) resource and environmental management and governance; (5) methods and applications; and (6) communication and policy. The 50 questions represented by these themes highlight meaningful trends in historical ecology that distill the field down to three explicit findings. First, historical ecology is fundamentally an applied research program. Second, this program seeks to understand long-term human-environment interactions with a focus on avoiding, mitigating, and reversing adverse ecological effects. Third, historical ecology is part of convergent trends toward transdisciplinary research science, which erodes scientific boundaries between the cultural and natural.
Highlights
Historical ecology is a field of inquiry that has come of age and currently finds itself at a crossroads
The goal of the exercise was to set priority or key research questions among participants, recognizing that (1) developments in historical ecology and its meanings differ across disciplines and geographical context, and (2) questions were inspired by researchers more heavily engaged on the anthropological and archaeological spectrum of historical ecology
The anthropological slant will serve to address those in the natural sciences who may acknowledge that humans cannot be removed from their long-lived landscapes, but struggle with how to reconcile this influence in their research [11,31]. Those working in 50 questions for historical ecology countries that have a rich history of coupling the natural and social sciences (Egypt, India, Greece), but were not represented, can borrow, contrast, model, critique, be inspired by the diverse list of questions that can be reframed in many global contexts
Summary
Historical ecology is a field of inquiry that has come of age and currently finds itself at a crossroads. The appeal of historical-ecological research is that it operates on multiple temporal scales and across disciplinary boundaries that have long separated the social and natural sciences [1,7]. It generates applied research questions and data for historically grounded and socially just conservation programs, in which environmental initiatives consider the totality of human-environment interactions and foster a critical awareness of the imposition of “green” policy on communities, many of whom may be marginalized [2,8,9,10]. Based on our research focus, two “types” of historical ecology appear to have formed, primarily associated with either archaeology or ecology, and resulting in a parallel but largely non-overlapping literature [6,13,14,15,16,17]
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