Approaches to place-specific urban biodiversity — companion resource page for a talk given at the 2026 ASLA Conference on Landscape Architecture, Los Angeles.
Historical ecology is not about recreating the past — it’s about understanding the ecological, cultural, and physical patterns and processes that shaped a landscape, and how people lived in and managed it. For the Los Angeles Basin, that means reading waste places, remnant patches, and marginal soils as more than a blank slate, and treating Indigenous management of this landscape over roughly 10,000 years as part of the same continuous history as its physical and ecological patterns. Below are the projects, tools, and resources referenced in the talk.
Los Angeles Landscape History Project
A collaboration among five universities and members of three tribes (Chumash, Tataviam, and Gabrieleño/Kizh) documenting the Indigenous landscape of the LA Basin with ecological specificity — reconstructed topography, historical vegetation, water features, and quantitative species distribution models, integrated with Indigenous knowledge shared by tribal co-investigators in their own words.
- Los Angeles Landscape History Project — project site and interactive maps
- Mapping Los Angeles Landscape History: The Indigenous Landscape (2023 final report to the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation) (StoryMap)
- “Mapping project reveals LA’s Indigenous past” — USC Dornsife coverage of the project
Related research on this site
Historical Ecology — reconstructing the landscapes cities have paved over, including related work on the California Channel Islands
Historical ecology projects elsewhere
- Welikia Project (formerly the Mannahatta Project) — Wildlife Conservation Society’s reconstruction of pre-contact Manhattan and the greater New York City boroughs
- SFEI Historical Ecology — San Francisco Estuary Institute’s historical ecology studies spanning California’s rivers, estuaries, and upland areas, from Sacramento and the Bay-Delta to San Diego County
Tools for doing this work yourself
- USGS topoView — browse and download the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection, 1884–present
- Calisphere — free access to over two million digitized photographs, documents, and other primary sources from California’s libraries, archives, and museums
- UCSB FrameFinder — UC Santa Barbara Library’s index to historical aerial photography collections, searchable by location
- SFEI Data Center — San Francisco Estuary Institute’s data and decision-support tools, including historical ecology GIS layers
- GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility — aggregated species occurrence records, including historical museum and herbarium specimens
Get in touch
email: longcore@ucla.edu