Darren Crook

Social-ecological systems in the Anthropocene: The need for integrating social and biophysical records at regional scales

Understanding social-ecological system dynamics is a major research priority for sustainable management of landscapes, ecosystems and resources. But the lack of multi-decadal records represents an important gap in information that hinders the development of the research agenda. Without improved information on the long-term and complex interactions between causal factors and responses, it will be difficult to answer key questions about trends, rates of change, tipping points, safe operating spaces and pre-impact conditions. Where available long-term monitored records are too short or lacking, palaeoenvironmental sciences may provide continuous multi-decadal records for an array of ecosystem states, processes and services. Combining these records with conventional sources of historical information from instrumental monitoring records, official statistics and enumerations, remote sensing, archival documents, cartography and archaeology produces an evolutionary framework for reconstructing integrated regional histories. We demonstrate the integrated approach with published case studies from Australia, China, Europe and North America.

Human impact on the environment in the Annecy Petit Lac catchment, Haute-Savoie : a documentary approach

Original article can be found at: http://www.erica.demon.co.uk/EH.html Copyright The White Horse Press. [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]

Detecting climatic signals in an anthropogenically disturbed catchment: The late-Holocene record from the Petit Lac d'Annecy, French Alps.

Historical and documentary records from the Petit Lac d’Annecy, indicate that human activities have been the dominant ‘geomorphic process’ shaping the catchment during the late Holocene, with deforestation, agriculture and artificial drainage profoundly affecting both the pace and spatial distribution of soil erosion. The impact of past climatic change on the evolution of the catchment is less certain because of the lack of long-term climate records for the site. Previous attempts to use the sediment record from the lake to investigate the role past climate change may have played were hampered by the difficulty in isolating and disentangling the climatic signal preserved within the archive, because of overprinting of human activity. This is a common problem in regions with a long history of human activity in the landscape. In this study we use a range of novel statistical techniques (including cross-correlation and cross spectral analysis) to assess the relative importance of climate in driving landscape dynamics. The statistical analysis is carried out on an updated high-resolution palaeo-environmental data set from the Petit Lac d’Annecy. The results of the statistical analysis indicate that regional climate phenomena such as the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation are partly responsible for landscape dynamics at Petit Lac d’Annecy throughout the late Holocene. We find that the Petit Lac d’Annecy catchment typically requires decades, or longer, to respond to changes in precipitation, reflecting the stochastic nature of river sediment storage and transport. The use of a 4 yr integrated lake core record effectively attenuates the ‘signal shredding’ effect of shorter-term internally generated sediment transport processes. Nonetheless, the lake record of climatically induced geormorphic process–responses is weak compared with the pervasive impact of human activities.

An investigation into the age and origin of Suranga in the foothills of the Western Ghats of India

This paper presents the evidence for determining the age and origin of suranga irrigation found mainly in southern Karnataka and northern Kerala in the foothills of the Western Ghats of south India. It draws on on-going research that has attempted to use an interdisciplinary approach to date the system using Indian Archives, British and Portuguese colonial archives, etymology, oral testimony archaeology, phenology and palaeo dating techniques. The results from this study put the origins of the system at around 1900–1940 CE. These results are compared with the current academic discourse that supports the view that the system originates from ancient Persia and qanat technology, because of the long established trade links with Persia and the Arabian Peninsula in the Malabar region. We argue that a new ‘origin discourse’ should be framed around these much more recent dates. The methodological constraints behind both theories are discussed throughout to enable the reader to appreciate the limitations of both arguments.

Traditional Methods of Groundwater Abstraction and Recharge along the Windward Side of the Foothills of the Western Ghats of India

Darren Crook, Sudhir Tripathi, ‘Traditional Methods of Groundwater Abstraction and Recharge along the Windward Side of the Foothills of the Western Ghats of India’, in Andreas N. Angelakis, Eustathios Chiotis, Saeid Eslamian, Herbert Weingartner, eds., Underground Aqueducts Handbook, (USA: CRC Press, 2016), ISBN 978-1498748308.

Bureaucratic control of irrigation and labour in late-imperial China: the uses of administrative cartography in the Miju catchment, Yunnan

The sequence of 12 woodblock maps presented here from the mid-nineteenth-century gazetteer for the department of Dengchuan in southwest China shows the Miju river and the irrigation system that lay at the heart of its farming economy. The incorporation into the cartography of much of the administrative detail related to the compulsory mobilization of labour for the annual clearance of mud makes it unusual among Chinese maps depicting water control in this period. The clarity with which it shows the recent formation of a long, spit-like delta of deposited sediment protruding into the Erhai, the large mountain lake into which the river empties, also assists the dating and analysis of the environmental crisis that occasioned it. During the late seventeenth century, and much of the eighteenth, the pressure of population caused the opening for cultivation of the unstable mountain soils on the slopes of the catchment just upstream of the section depicted by the maps. The result was a massive increase in the river’s load of sediment. The dykes of its downstream bed rose to a level above the surrounding farmland. The increased need for maintenance led to the restructuring of parts of the system of government, and the lives of the local people, so as to handle the new problems. We have found that the accuracy of the maps was adequate for planning and executing middle-sized water control projects at the technical level of that time.