Odessa in Bloom
The Big Picture
The cost of Russia’s war against Ukraine is high, whether calculated in terms of the loss of human life, cultural heritage, or landscape. In the face of all that is being destroyed, this project will help preserve the history of the natural world of Ukraine, starting with some of the most fragile elements of the ecosystem: plants.Perhaps it is a small thing to know where the sunflowers grew around Odessa in the 1890s, but it is a powerful thing to be able to talk substantively about changes in biodiversity and the evolution of the built environment over time.
We have another motive for working with botanical registers as well. Tsarist bureaucrats described their domain - in this case southern Ukraine - in terms of provinces and districts, but naturalists and farmers saw hillsides and coastal cliffs, flooded meadows and suburban kitchen gardens. Non-state actors used rich, highly localized spatial vocabularies to describe the world around them. It isn’t easy to put those places “on the map.”
We like a good challenge. And it is worth it. Attempting to "see" historical space from the perspectives of those who inhabited it is an essential task for anyone trying to understand the past.
Botanical Data
In the 19th century, botanists combed the land, intent on documenting every plant they could find, from cowbane to chokecherry. We are studying the lists they compiled and building a database that enables us to analyze distribution and prevalence. We are doing this because 1) the history of vegetation and cultivation is important in its own right, 2) plants serve as proxies for other silent actors in the environment, such as soil, insects, and wildlife, and 3) mapping plants is absurdly difficult and therefore fun.We started with a flora (a list of plant observations) published by Petro Stepanovich Shesterikov in 1894. The list has 950 entries, some of which merely state that previous botanists were wrong to claim [plant X] grew in the Odesa region. Once we pulled those out and eliminated observations of plants growing in other regions, we were left with a list of 815 species. Shesterikov observed many species in multiple locations, giving a total of 2,834 observations.
In fact, before we go any further, here is the data profile:
- 815 plant species
- 77 plant families
- 2,834 observations
- 99 observation locations, of which 45 are in the research area
- 79 habitats
Project Components
Consult the pages below to learn about the significance of each variable and to navigate our series of maps and visualizations.This project was made possible thanks to funding from the Harvard Data Science Initiative and support from the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
