By JAMES BELL
Hays Post
When 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.
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.
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 at 2704 Woodrow Court.
“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 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.
“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.”