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The Imperiia Project

What if you have no interest in plants?

Meet the "Plant Names Will Make You Raise Your Eyebrows" game board.

We selected the funniest and/or most perplexing plant names from our data and assembled them into an 8x8 grid. (The darker the square, the higher it scored on the "eyebrow" index.) Rest your cursor on any square to reveal its contents. You can thank us later.

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Odessa in Bloom 115 image_header 2024-04-01T16:46:13-04:00
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. Shesterikov (1859-1929) was a botanist and librarian of Novorossiia University, a member of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, the Kyiv Society of Naturalists, and the Novorossiia Society of Naturalists. He conducted fieldwork 1890-1891 between the banks of the Dnestr (Dniester) and Tylihul' (Tiligul’) rivers, describing his work as an effort to reveal the “geobotanical character” of the region.

Shesterikov's list has 950 entries, some of which merely state that previous botanists were wrong to claim [plant X] grew in the Odessa region. Once we pulled those out and eliminated observations of plants growing in other regions, we were left with a list of 815 species from 77 families. Shesterikov observed many species in multiple locations, giving a total of 2,813 observations.

Click here to access the platform in full screen.
Use the data wisely.
- Read the "Mapping Odessa" and "Mapping Habitats" sections.
- Keep in mind that the area allocated to each plant family in the "not-a-map" above is determined by the number of observations in the Flora. Each observation is represented by a colored dot. A dot is not a placemark: it tells you which family the observed plant belongs to rather than where it was observed. A quick glance will tell you that Shesterikov observed far more plants belonging to the Sunflower family than to the Orchid family. Remember, that does not necessarily mean there were more sunflowers than orchids: it only means that more are attested in the Flora Odessa.
- Pan/zoom, and use the "home" button.
- Click on any plant observation for full details, including species and family names. Each observation includes a link to the entry in the Global Biodiversity Information Facility: an authoritative data infrastructure with global coverage.
- The key to exploring the data is to use the filter buttons. It might take a minute for the data to load. In some cases it might seem there are no results. Try zooming in on the "not-a-map" on the left: when only a few observations are returned it can be hard to see them. If you select a plant on the left and no location is highlighted on the right, the plant was documented throughout the research area and not associated with a particular site.
The data allows us to ask a range of questions about the distribution and density of plant life. For example:
- How many species of the mustard family grew near Odessa in the 1890s?
- How many sunflower species could be found in local salt marshes?
- Were there any invasive plants?
- Where did the weeds tend to grow?
- Were you to travel back in time to do some hiking along quarries near the Black Sea coast, might you encounter any nightshades?
The data describes flowering plants, edible plants, plants that provide ground cover, shade, and protection against flooding. They run the spectrum from humble pond weeds and leafy rock dwellers to roses gracing the banks of estuaries. You will find milkwort, eel grass, St. John's wort, dogwood, and honeysuckle. In fact, you will find plants that grow in 79 different habitats across 41 locations.
Together they open a window on the natural world at the end of the 19th century. But remember, as much as there is to "see" here, Odessa in Bloom is built around a single primary source. It draws on only one of the dozens of flora that document botanical biodiversity in southern Ukraine and the Black Sea region. It is nothing more than a (metaphorical) seed. An early bloom.
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. The first phase of the project benefitted enormously from a collaboration with the Harvard Map Collection. Read about it here!