Modelling Styrian Land Use, 1820-1910 CE: Studying the Past Human-Earth System Dynamics of Industrialization

Objective

Historic data on human-Earth System interactions provides vital context for the environmental crises defining the 21st century. It is imperative, then, to develop reproducible, transposable, and scalable methods that can accurately integrate local patterns of past land use into planetary-scale Earth System models. An emerging method for reconciling historical data to the Earth System framework is the Circle Diagram method. This modelling system has capably integrated ethnographic, archaeological, and archival data to simulate subsistence and commercial behaviours in colonized and independent societies. Likewise, it has successfully described land use changes associated with ecological exchange, economic transformations, and state-imposed activities. Now, to study industrialization’s impacts and test the method’s transposability, this project will apply Circle Diagram Models to the former Austro-Hungarian Province of Styria (now Steiermark, Austria). To do so, it will gather and analyse cadastral maps, censuses, and archival data using both historical and digital humanities techniques, including machine learning-based image analysis. The project will then produce models for several socio-economically specific patterns of land use at three timepoints: 1820, 1870, and 1910. These will detail changes in land use, and therefore human-Earth System interactions, associated with burgeoning industrial activity in an understudied province; will demonstrate the method’s reproducibility in European contexts; and will improve its scalability by rendering large-scale archival data analysis less labour-intensive. The resulting models could then be the basis for continued modelling across the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, could inform ecological research focused on the environmental legacies of changes in Styrian land use, and—in conjunction with Philippine data—could be initial entries in a Global Land Use Archive that promotes research on human-Earth System interactions.