Centre for Environmental History

picture river landscape

Welcome to the Centre for Environmental History!


107. ZUG-Minisymposium, 15.05.2025

Als Bergbau noch nachhaltig war?
Ressourcenmanagement als Fall für eine angewandte Geschichtswissenschaft

Presentation:
Sebastian Felten, Sebastian Leitner
Institut für Geschichte, Universität Wien

> Details

Simone Gingrich | Foto: Pilo Pichler


Umweltgeschichte im Fokus: Wie Simone Gingrich die Vergangenheit für eine nachhaltige Zukunft erforscht

Die historischen Entwicklungen von landwirtschaftlicher Intensivierung, Wiederbewaldung und der Expansion tierischer Produktion haben nicht nur die Ernährungsgrundlagen für wachsende Bevölkerungen geschaffen, sondern auch erhebliche ökologische Konsequenzen nach sich gezogen – von steigenden Treibhausgasemissionen bis hin zu Veränderungen in globalen Stoffkreisläufen.

Antrittsvorlesung
Umweltgeschichte im Anthropozän
Univ.Prof.in Dr.in Simone Gingrich

Montag, 24. März 2025, um 17:00 Uhr
BOKU University - Ilse-Wallentin-Haus - SR 29
Peter-Jordan-Straße 82, 1190 Wien
und im LIVESTREAM auf https://youtube.com/live/ais7V_yYNcQ?feature=share


CfP: Workshop 
Mobilizing Nature: The Environmental History of the Ottoman Danubian Frontier

The Danube, “le roi des fleuves de l’Europe” (the king of European rivers), as Napoleon Bonaparte called it, is the second longest river in Europe, surpassed by the Volga in Russia only. Originating from the Black Forests in Germany, it flows through or past ten Central and Southeastern European countries before it flows into the Black Sea. The Danube was a vital commercial and military shipping channel for the Ottomans. From the fourteenth century, they increasingly used the Danube as a waterway to move supplies and munition between the Black Sea and the Hungarian plains. Especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Danube was an inseparable part of Ottoman campaign logistics. It enabled the Ottomans to apply their military projections to Europe and contributed to their success in their military operations against the Habsburgs.

The workshop is part of the project “DANFront: An Environmental History of the Early Modern Ottoman Military Frontier in the Middle and Lower Danube,” funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (PAT2459324).

Deadline for proposals: May 31, 2025

Ort / Place: Vienna
Zeit / Time: March 12-13, 2026

>Details

New WebGIS Application
Vienna’s landscape evolution 200 – 2010 CE and historical hydraulic constructions

As part of several interdisciplinary projects on the environmental history of Vienna’s waterbodies, the past landscape was reconstructed from 200 CE onwards. Step by step the historical states of the landscape were compiled. The resulting maps of Vienna’s landscape evolution from 200 to 2010 provide a solid basis for interpreting the environmental conditions for Vienna’s urban development and help to localise certain riverine and urban landmarks relevant for the history of Vienna.

Details
Click here for the WebGIS Application

The Austrian Danube River: Historical State and Current Situation

The 13th Annual Forum of the EU Strategy for the Danube Region will take place in Vienna on 20 and 21 June 2024. The Centre for Environmental History is contributing a large display panel showing how the Austrian Danube has changed since the middle of the 19th century. The numerous river restoration measures carried out over the last 30 years are also presented.

A smaller version of the approximately 4 metre long display panel can be downloaded here (jpg).

Information on the Annual Forum can be found at 13th Annual Forum of the EU Strategy for the Danube Region - EUSDR - Danube Strategy Point (danube-region.eu).

Results of the conference are available at Annual Fora - EUSDR - Danube Strategy Point (danube-region.eu).


Heritage Science an der BOKU

BOKU Forscherinnen und Forscher unterschiedlicher Disziplinen erforschen das Natur- und Kulturerbe Österreichs. Oft beschäftigen sie sich dabei mit Detailfragen. Doch erst durch interdisziplinäre Kooperationen können diese Erkenntnisse zu einem "großen Ganzen" zusammengefügt werden. Deshalb haben sich Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeiter der BOKU vernetzt und sind dem österreichweiten Netzwerk Heritage Science Austria beigetreten. Im Rahmen des Heritage Science Café wurden ausgewählte Projekte von BOKU Forscher*innen präsentiert. Der Film folgt den Forschenden ins Archiv und Labor, bei Feldforschungen, auf Dachböden und ins Bergwerk und zeigt, wie der Mensch unsere Umwelt bearbeitet, gestaltet und verändert hat. Der Blick zurück hilft uns, Antworten auf Herausforderungen der Zukunft zu finden.

>zum Film


Now Online

Umwelthistorische Datenbank Österreich
Environmental History Database Austria (EHDA)

Materialien zur Umweltgeschichte Österreichs Nr. 8

In 2004, the then newly founded Centre for Environmental History (ZUG) started to systematically search and collect bibliographical data on environmental historical literature in Austria. Over the years, the data set has grown to the 3,751 entries tabulated in this volume. Until 2019, the collection then named "Environmental History Database Austria (EHDA)" was available for online searches in a custom-made environment. EHDA entries comprise works with publication dates from 1945 until 2019 and include hard-to-find grey literature and academic qualification works. Since EHDA went online about 15 years ago, digitalisation has markedly impacted scientific publishing and research. Powerful finding aids, mostly with access to full texts, full-text searches and linked searches have become available. While EHDA has been regularly updated, because committed colleagues have invested time and expertise, we have not been able to modernize the tool in terms of search possibilities and links. We have therefore taken EHDA off the Internet. This volume of the “Materialien” makes the entire content of EHDA available to all interested parties as a fully searchable pdf document with carefully preserved tags. The introduction includes search tips and explains the search possibilities we have tried to preserve or are able to now offer under the new possibilities of full-text indexing and other search engine possibilities.

>zum Materialienband (pdf, 4,35 MB)

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