Students affiliated with my projects

Gordon was born in Glasgow, Scotland and grew up in the east coast fishing town of
Arbroath. In Scotland, Geography is still a significant component of high school in
Scotland, with a strong geomorphology focus. The early Scottish geologists Hutton and Lyell obviously featured strongly and Scotland is a physically diverse land to discover. Overlying the glacial topography is a landscape scarred with millennia of human occupation. Many sites are obvious as forts, mounds, and the likes but there are many more subtle signals in the landscape. Among the most emotive are the relict field systems of the Western Highlands and Hebrides. The significance of such past land use on today’s environment is poorly understood, particularly in treeless landscapes and soils.

During his undergraduate studies in Dundee, he took a year to study in Ontario focusing on Canadian studies. His subsequent Master’s degree at the University of North Dakota opened his eyes to the depth of human impacts in the Americas (and the world’s misreading of pre-European American culture). This interest extends in his current research, as he seeks to measure the environmental legacy of historic human land use in western Scotland, with a focused study on the John Muir Trust preserve on the Knoydart Peninsula.

It is ironic to Gordon that he had to come to America to discover that Scotland has such rich research material in long-term land use - which American researchers tend to overlook. But, John Muir, too, came from Scotland to Wisconsin and discovered the high road of the naturalist’s view.  For Gordon, soils hold a memory of their development that is frequently used by archaeologists to elucidate past land use. Gordon plans on continuing his geographically focused study of soils to elucidate the impacts of past cultivation on the environment today. His theorem is that soils strongly determine vegetation patterns and represent an ecological echo of past land use that influenced their development. Medieval soil amendments created German plaggen soils, and nutrient redistribution by grazing is recognized in other systems today, but these phenomena have not been studied in western Scotland where agro-pastoralism dominated for centuries. For Gordon, the continued use of soil analysis permits a lucid, spatially explicit understanding of land use impacts and he hopes to capture fine scale variations that aid our comprehension of current cultural biogeography and humanity’s role in creating them.

Gordon’s project is the most exotic of our student’s efforts, but not a far stretch for him, for it is near his home. Gordon is examining extensive abandoned field systems on the remote Knoydart Peninsula of the Western Highlands, near the Isle of Skye. Knoydart hosts remarkably steep terrain that is difficult to access and has not seen extensive farming since nearly 150 years ago, when the land was abandoned during the Highland Clearances.  Gordon will initially use remote sensing information to locate suitable study areas and evaluate surface features and soil morphology related to human activities on the landscape (furlongs or bed sets, and individual beds) using  a handheld high-resolution Trimble pocket-receiver will be used to stream data into a Palm Pilot running ESRI’s ArcPad while surveying chosen field systems. Finally, Gordon will evaluate the condition of the soils and the effects of amendment addition to augment nutrient-deficient soils, commonly practiced in pre-industrial agriculture. The most abundant amendments in the area would have been manure from animals and humans, shell sand from the tidal beaches, ash from burnt peat, seaweed harvested both on shore and in shallow offshore reaches, and cut turf from higher uncultivated (pasture) areas.  To assess the remnant fertility of soils amended for hundreds of years with these amendments, soil samples will be gathered the five representative sites on Knoydart.  Sites will have a paired “undisturbed” location to serve as a background check for the soil within the fields. Analytical methods include particle size analysis, pH, nutrient tests, particularly phosphorus, which was a very limiting nutrient in these settings.  Because the landscapes on Knoydart are presently undergoing a form of ‘unmitigated restoration’, enacted by simple inaction of the landowners, the soil data will constitute an important underpinning in evaluating the effect of altered ecological trajectories caused by the actions of humans in what is thought to be relatively “low impact sustainable” agriculture.