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About

This project is an interactive timeline that walks you through the Carleton Arboretum at different points in time in the last century. Our maps are from Carleton's Digital Collection on the Arb.

Why is this important?

This project is important for better understanding Carleton's Arboretum's land usage and development over time. These georeferenced maps paint a picture of how the landscape has evolved and what choices were and were not made when devolping the Arboretum for campus use. It can be useful to look back at the history for future planning of the Arb's devlopment and for beter understanding Carleton's previous phases in the Arb's expansion.

Our Team

Evie LeDuc

Evie LeDuc

Jayti Arora

Jayti Arora

Quoc Nguyen

Quoc Nguyen

Aishwarya Varma

Aishwarya Varma

Connor Flinn

Connor Flinn

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Processes/Brainstorming

When brainstorming for this project, we knew that we wanted to create a visualization that combined georeferencing and a timeline to show the history of the Carleton Arboretum’s landscape. We wanted to put this information onto a webpage so that it could be used by anyone who is curious about how the Arb’s landscape has changed over the years. We divided up the tasks into website development, research, and georeferencing to efficiently work through all of our project components.

Sources

The main source that we used for this project was the Cowling Arboretum Collection from the Carleton Digital Archives. The archive has a lot of information about the arb, ranging from geology to history. We used the maps of the arb in the collection ranging from 1930 all the way to 2012. There are a number of other sources out there including the Cowling Arboretum Website which has further information on the Arb’s history.

Presentation

We decided to create a custom HTML website so that we could have creative freedom and to easily embed the maps and timeline. We wanted to show the history of the landscape over time, so we created a timeline while also having the option to compare maps side by side.

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An Analysis of the Maps



1931-1964: Overstrud, Warner, Peterson, and Ogden farms all shrunk as land was bought by the college

1964-1965: even though the land was owned by Carleton, it was still used for agriculture

1965-1966: few changes

1966-1971: the first map to focus on recreational use of the arboretum with no mention of agricultural use. It also describes the presence of Asian tree/shrub species as an impressive feat, but in the decades since, the Arb has dedicated thousands of dollars and man hours to removing these species because of their negative ecosystem impacts.
1971-1990: the first map describing the habitats present in the Arb, which represents a shift to a more intentional management approach

1990-1996: the number of recognized habitats increased from 8 to 12, and much of the agricultural land was replanted to new habitat. From 1991-1997, 8 parcels of land were converted to either successional upland forest or prairie.

1996-1999: this is an annotated version of the 1996 map showing the locations of four monitored turtles in the arb

1999-2000: Agricultural land was completely transitioned to mowed grass. Another section of forest was planted in the Northeast, near the women’s league cabin.
2000-2003: Large parcels of mowed grass (formerly cropland) were converted to prairie. Successional upland forest plantings continued, and the grassy patch in the Northeast corner of the arb continued to shrink. (the 2003 map on the timeline is the 2000 map)

2003-2008: (2008 map isn’t on the maps app for comparison) All mowed grass patches in the lower arboretum were converted to either upland forest or prairie. The large chunk of mowed grass East of Parr and Farm houses was converted to cropland.

2008-2012: One large parcel of land Southeast of Kettle Hole Marsh was converted to prairie from cropland.