By JAMES BELL Hays PostWhen University
of Kansas distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology A. Townsend Peterson recently traveled to Hays to take a picture
of a residential neighborhood with a drone, it would have been hard to imagine
the scope of the project.It
was after all just a picture of an unassuming intersection.<figure>
 <img src="https://media.eaglewebservices.com/public/2020/7/1595628005600.jpeg" alt="Courtesy A. Townsend Peterson" />
 <figcaption>Courtesy A. Townsend Peterson</figcaption>
 </figure>But taking the picture was just a small
piece of an ongoing project that looks at the ways landscapes have changed in
recent history and includes hundreds of locations carefully planned after hours of meticulous research.The work began years ago after Peterson started accumulating
old photographs and images of landscapes from locations outside of the United
States.“I’ve done that with a couple of
historical collections in Mexico and was planning this summer to start doing
the same in Brazil,” he said.But with international travel hampered
due to COVID-19, Peterson looked a little closer to home and he started asking
the same questions about landscapes in Kansas.So the hunt for more images began.<a href="https://hayspost.com/posts/1e010215-2bd1-41d4-a3b4-b3b9d719a95f">During an early search, he found a
lithograph of “Contest Grove,” the farmstead home built by Martin Allen that is
now surrounded by other homes and businesses solidly within the town of Hays</a>&nbsp;at 2704 Woodrow Court.<figure>
 <img src="https://media.eaglewebservices.com/public/2020/7/1595627950441.jpeg" alt="Courtesy Ellis County Historical Society" />
 <figcaption>Courtesy Ellis County Historical Society</figcaption>
 </figure>“It was really fascinating because the
detail was so great and this birds-eye-view perspective, I was intrigued by it
and put it on my to-do list,” Peterson said.Turning to the Kansas Historical Society’s
collection of plat books Peterson found a prolific source of images of old
farmsteads in Kansas just like the one from Hays.“It turns out that some of those plat
books, but not all, just some of them include these lithograph depictions of
Kansas farms,” he said.So, as any good scientist would, he
went through every plat book in the library and found approximately 400 of the lithographs.He then added another 100 from another
source.Using the plat books lithographs were a
“fad,” he said, that ended around 1890 so there is a high density from the
eastern part of Kansas, Peterson said.“Then just very scattered images in
western Kansas,” he said.After finding images that fit his study, Peterson has to find the exact location pictured and when the image was
made.“I think the Contest Grove one says
‘Hays,’ " he said. "I looked for Contest Grove and there is nothing on Google except a link
to the image,” Peterson said.So Peterson turned to the local
historical society, which then shared the location of the home — now in
Hays and, luckily enough, still standing even as the area developed as Hays grew
north.In general, he said only about 10 percent
of the images he finds has the original building on it and 50 percent have a new
building in the same place. The rest are now empty.“Each one of them is quite a bit of
work,” he said.About an hour of work is required to find the historical location of the farm and to find the present day
location&nbsp;for each image, Peterson said.After verifying the information, he travels to the exact spot from the original and uses a drone to capture an image that can be compared to the original image.With the timeframe of the lithographs
and their proliferation in the late 1800s, he believes the project could be
easily be expanded to the eastern part of the U.S.“But it would be a pretty nightmarish thing
to do,” Peterson said, noting the potential of thousands of pictures and sites
to be photographed and compared.Just doing the 300 left in Kansas, he
said,will take several years.Despite the work required, the image comparisons
offer a window into ecology that is difficult to source any other way.By looking at the way the land has
changed between the image creation and now fills a gap in the study between the
quick timeframes of recent biology and much older ones thousands — or tens of thousands — of
years ago.&nbsp;“In
biology, we work on different time scales,” Peterson said.The ecologist time scale is short, usually
in the 10- to 20-year range, so very few data sets are available and the more
ancient data creates a gap in the record between decades to millennia.That is where Peterson’s interest with
the project lies.“So I started playing with deeper time
processes affecting the distribution of species,” he said. “I’m very interested in
how land-use changes over time.“Think about the landscape around Lawrence,”
Peterson said. “It's farmland with wood lots here and there.”He said the landscape is very similar to
his home state of Ohio.“The landscapes and the vegetation are
awfully similar, so the interesting thing is eastern Kansas was originally prairie
and then has forested with fire control, but southwestern Ohio was originally
forested and was deforested by settlers,” Peterson said. “So the two landscapes
have converged on the same outward appearance from very different beginning
points. That’s really fascinating and I would love to know more about the
landscape dynamics that are behind that.”

Historic Hays home included in ecology study