Emily W.B. Russell Southgate

Emily W.B. Russell Southgate

Adjunct Professor of Biology

Tel: (301) 696-3649 
E-mail: ewbsouthgate@gmail.com
Office: Hodson Science and Technology Center, Room 153
Office Hours: By Appointment

• Ph.D., in botany, Rutgers University
• M.A., in history, Rutgers University
• M.A., in botany, Duke University
• B.S., in biology, Denison University

• Environmental History
• Historical Ecology
• Plant Ecology
• Palynology

Emily Southgate, a former research associate professor at Rutgers University, conducts research at the intersection of ecology and history. She has worked extensively with the National Park Service in their cultural parks, providing historical ecological background to help guide management of their natural resources. She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, where, together with colleagues, she integrated data from palynological research in the northeastern United States to arrive at a composite picture of changing forest composition over the last 500 years. Professor Southgate's book, “People and the Land Through Time. Linking Ecology and History” (Yale Univ. Press, 1997) has inspired both ecologists and environmental historians to incorporate each other's fields in their research. She is also active in the environmental community in Virginia, serving on the board of the Goose Creek Association and as a “citizen scientist” sampling stream macroinvertebrates, birds for the Loudoun County Breeding Bird Atlas and grassland vegetation.

Professor Southgate's research interests are focused on reconstructing past vegetation patterns and species distributions and relating these to current conditions. She has presented research at numerous regional, national and international scientific conferences. Her current major project is to map plant communities identified in 18th century land surveys in parts of northwestern Virginia in order to assess the conditions that maintained them in the past and which might maintain them in the present. The data also provide guidelines for searching for undiscovered plant communities today, so that they might be protected.

• Russell, E. W. B. Indian-set fires in the forests of the northeastern United States. Ecology 64:79-88. 1983. Condensation in BioScience 33:462. 1983
• Russell, E. W. B. People and the Land Through Time: Linking Ecology and History. Yale University Press, 306 pages. 1997
• Russell, E. W. B. and R. B. Davis. Five centuries of changing forest vegetation in the northeastern United States. Plant Ecology 155:1-13. 2001
• Russell, E. W. B and M. Bürgi. Ecological aspects of multifunctional landscapes in historical perspective. in Multifunctional Landscapes. Theory, Values and History. WIT Press: Southampton, UK. 2004
• Southgate, E. W. B. (Russell). 2010. Herbaceous plant communities on the Delaware River floodplain, New Jersey, during the mid-Holocene. Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society 137:152-162.