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| Abstract Title:
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| Situating Biogeography: Toward a historical account of post-Darwinian distribution studies
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| Graduate Student Presenter:
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Megan Raby
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| Name of the Author(s) and Affiliation(s):
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Megan Raby, UW-Madison Department of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, Center for Culture, History, and Environment Graduate Student Affiliate, Certificate on Humans and the Global Environment IGERT Fellow
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Creating a sustainable future requires an understanding of human-environment relationships in previous centuries. Science has itself played a powerful role in shaping these relationships. Therefore, an appreciation of the historical nature of scientific knowledge is necessary in order to understand the ways that current scientific models are embedded in past efforts to represent and intervene in the world. The history of biogeography has particularly broad implications. Biogeography is central to modern debates about the relationship between biodiversity and sustainability; it is also implicated in the global surveillance of ecosystems, including the identification of biodiversity “hotspots” and climate change effects.
Scientific understandings of life’s distribution and diversity have closely paralleled the globalization of capital flows, the expansion of empires, and increasingly sophisticated techniques for gathering and monitoring human population data. Historically, biogeography has also been entangled with European and American efforts to visualize and map relationships between climate, disease, and development throughout the globe. The interrelated scientific and environmental changes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have striking parallels with those ongoing today. Nevertheless, while the pre-Darwinian history of biogeography has been well synthesized, the history of the field from 1859 through its emergence as a discipline in the mid-twentieth century has not been adequately studied. This period includes not only the application of evolutionary ideas to studies of species distribution, but also the rise of ecology and the refinement of biogeographical surveying and mapping techniques. This poster will survey the historiography of biogeography, raising questions for further research.
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