UPEI has a new Canada Research Chair in geospatial humanities leading some research on how the use of farmland has changed over the past 50 years.

Josh MacFadyen is the new chair and the director of the Georeach Lab, where he and a team of students are researching the environmental history and historical geography of Atlantic Canada — including P.E.I.

Geospatial humanities research sounds complicated, but it is simply the use of digital technology — like geographic information systems — to better understand land and map changes over time.

"What we plan to do is, in the Back 50 project, is get people to map their back 50. And we are asking them to think back 50 years. What was the process of land use change at that time? What were the resources you gathered from the land?" MacFadyen said.

In 1964, farms that had been in a family since the Charlottetown Conference in 1864 were given the status of "century farm." In 2014, when those farms turned 150, there were a lot less people who still owned the same land, MacFadyen said.

"It had dropped down about 90 farms by that point in 2014. And even fewer now," MacFadyen said.

Student lives on century farm

One of MacFadyen's students, Abby Craswell, lives on one of these farms.

"That farm has been in our family for a long time," Craswell said.

How did we become this society that we are today? What changes were involved in that? — Josh MacFadyen, UPEI

Currently the family isn't living in the farmhouse, but they are living in a house that is on the farm property.

"It's interesting to see the shift in the land, like we're looking at a lot of hedgerow projects and the change in the forest right now on a lot of the maps. And that's really interesting to see how the land use on our farm specifically has changed, but also in other farms on the Island," Craswell said.

Now, there is a lot more strip development and urbanization, said MacFadyen.

"So the map today looks very different from the one that Abby's working on from the 1930s."

P.E.I. is unique

One thing that makes P.E.I. unique for this type of research is that other parts of the Western world have urbanized and modernized rapidly, MacFadyen said.

"It's actually studying that kind of transition which is really one of the big questions that history tries to get at is: How did we become this society that we are today? What changes were involved in that?" MacFadyen said.

"But most of these places have to study in a different way. We have the advantage, if you could call it that, of people who remember a different time."

If you wish to participate and map the last 50 years of your family farm, you can apply at the UPEI website.

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