             
 The LUHNA Book!
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One of the recurring themes of recent environmental literature is the dynamic nature of the Earth. We now accept that concepts of nature as static and unchanging are outmoded and that continuous change characterizes the planet, from its molten interior to the outer atmosphere, including the planet's surface and the ecosystems and biological diversity it supports. Yet while that realization is profound and perhaps long overdue, it immediately poses a host of related questions that are currently very difficult to answer: What types of changes are occurring now? How fast are they occurring? How do these changes compare with those that occurred in the past? And what does it all mean for future environmental quality and the habitability of the planet? This website addresses some of these questions for several regions of North America, but more importantly (and more ambitiously), it strives to convey the importance of a historical context for understanding ongoing changes in land cover and land use. It also aims to inspire scientists, educators, and science administrators to contribute to the development of a comprehensive land-use history of North America to guide environmental policy and management decisions during the coming century and beyond. The efforts that have led to this work began during the early months of the National Biological Service (NBS), now the Biological Resources Division (BRD) of the U.S. Geological Survey. As the NBS sought to understand and articulate the needs of resource managers to scientists and policy makers, and to chart a course for integrating future biological research efforts, the value of historical land-use and landcover data became clear. In 1995, an initial workshop convened a group of scholars and resource managers working on the issues of land use, land cover, and ecological change. Historians, geographiers, ecologists, and sociologists met with policy makers from resource management agencies and nongovernmental institutions to discuss how disparate data sources, archived in different formats and at numerous locations, might be brought together to provide an integrated perspective on land cover and land-use history, from pre-European times to the present. Following upon the recommendations that emerged from that meeting, NBS initiated the Land Use History of North America program - LUHNA - to guide future efforts to improve understanding of the relationship between historical land use and land cover. As a first step in developing LUHNA, NBS and NASA's Mission to Planet Earth (now the Earth Science Enterprise) jointly sponsored the 10 pilot projects whose results are presented here. But this work far exceeds what could have been produced solely from the modest support offered by the fledgling LUHNA project. In all cases, the authors drew from ongoing projects and synthesized many years of original research to produce overviews of environmental change from around the continent. Each chapter was reviewed independently by peer scientists. Editorial work at the National Wetlands Research Center resulted in a presentation that is informative and authoritative, yet accessible to the nonspecialist. Throughout its rather long and punctuated development, the LUHNA project has benefited from the support of visionary leaders within NASA and the Department of the Interior. This website, however, exists primarily because of the deep commitment of the contributing authors to the goal of creating a comprehensive land-use history for North America. The work presented here is the beginning of what we hope will become a much larger effort to develop data products and analytical tools that will allow researchers, resource managers, educators, and the general public to explore and analyze the fascinating history of human land use and changes in land cover. We hope that this long-term perspective will provide a context for assessing environmental conditions, interpreting current trends, and making more informed policy and management decisions for the future.
Thomas D. Sisk
Project History
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