This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Have you ever wondered what your Melbourne suburb looked like before all the streets and houses? For Melbourne's expanding outer suburbs, we have photos, satellite images and living memories.
But what about the city's older inner suburbs, which were built well over a century ago? The answers can be found by piecing together some of the city's earliest European maps stored in Victoria's Public Records Office (PROV). These maps were created between the late 1830s and mid-1850s by colonial surveyors like Robert Hoddle, William Wedge Darke and Henry Boorn Foote, who traversed different parts of what would become metropolitan Melbourne with convict survey parties to partition land for sale to British settlers.
In doing so, they marked the course of creeks and rivers, locations of swamps, the routes of early roads and the nature of the soil. And, luckily for our research, they also marked trees to determine the corners of lots. There, in this 180-year-old script, is the species composition of Melbourne's original urban forest.
Over the past 15 years, we've worked to reconstruct these landscapes. And now, we have our first ecological view of 1840s Melbourne. While this kind of reconstruction has been done across North America, this is the first time that all the pieces of this ecological puzzle have been brought together for Melbourne.
To do this, we needed not only the information in the maps but also complex mathematical modeling to extrapolate the data and determine the likely density of trees in the area. We overlaid the PROV maps over present-day Melbourne. And the results contain some incredible detail.
The original tables and maps recorded trees by their old common names, not the species names we use now. But by taking those old names and reading them against the native vegetation still growing in Melbourne, ecologists can pin down exactly which species the surveyors saw. "Gums" were the most common tree listed in the inner suburbs.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
