This website is no longer updated and has been replaced with a static copy. The Spatial History Project was active at Stanford University from 2007-2022, engaging in dozens of collaborative projects led by faculty, staff, graduate students, post-docs, visiting scholars and others at Stanford and beyond. More than 150 undergraduate students from more than a dozen disciplines contributed to these projects. In addition to a robust intellectual exchange built through these partnerships, research outputs included major monographs, edited volumes, journal articles, museum exhibitions, digital articles, robust websites, and dozens of lightweight interactive visualizations, mostly developed with Adobe Flash (now defunct). While most of those publications live on in other forms, the content exclusive to this website is preserved in good faith through this static version of the site. Flash-based content is partially available in emulated form using the Ruffle emulator.
Reconstructing California Conservation History
In this era of change, understanding how past conservation efforts have either succeeded or failed is of utmost importance–only after such an assessment can we move forward and propose strategic conservation plans for the future. This project aims to:
- &bullreconstruct a history of conservation of select areas of California by analyzing historic land cover maps and comparing them with contemporary land cover
- &bullexamine when (time) and where (space) protection areas were established
- &bulland assess how successful these protection areas were in conserving the natural resources they were created for
This is a challenging task, as the information on conservation history is scattered across multiple sources, and housed in a variety of organizations and federal, state, and local governments. However, the task is equally exciting as the data assembled through this project will provide new avenues and information to enable improved conservation efforts, particularly in the face of ongoing dramatic environmental change.
Former Research Assistants:
Alice Avery, Ma'ayan Dembo, Emily Francis, Taz George, Alexandra Peers, Claudia Preciado, Matthew Walter
GALLERY:
Conservation Histories of California
Conservation for the land or for the species?
A History of Bay Area Open Space Conservation
A History of Conservation Land Acquisition in California
Reconstructing Conservation History: A link between ecology and history
