Cooperating Professor Quaternary and Climate Studies
Professor of Agricultural History, Maine Agricultural Experiment Station
Climate Change Institute
University of Maine
Bryand Global Sciences Center
Orono, ME 04469-5790
207-581-2190 Phone
207-581-1203 Fax
dcsmith@maine.edu
My interests lie primarily in the areas of agricultural history, and land use, both in forestry and agriculture. Recently I have been involved in work on climate change as a factor in human affairs, as well as work on food intake, dietary change, the impact of technology and scientific ideas. In the institute this has involved a project designed to attempt to recreate, through instrumental and proxy records, the climate of the past 300 years in New England, and New York. The work involves recapture of these records, and attempting to apply them in a long-term fashion to detect change and cyclicity (if there is any). Students have been involved in developing the proxy method, both through study of annual events, but also through creation of a record from many (several thousand) daily weather diaries from 1620 to 1900. A new project will narrow the search to between seven and ten daily diaries kept by small farmers and who describe their daily work in detail. It is hoped that these proxy records will determine how the behaviour of people has changed, modified, and been effected by perceptions of the climate over time.
In addition to this I have contributed to solutions of the dating problems posed by artifacts in the period in which C14 and Pb201 studies are anomalous. This work, as part of the Crustal Warping Project is winding down. Part of this work has involved developing a seismic history of the Maine coast.
Smith, D.C., 1980. A History of the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station, 1980.
Smith, D.C., Baron, W.R., Borns, H.W., Jr., and Bridges, A.E., 1981. The impact of Climate on Maine Agriculture, 1785-1885, in Climate and History, T.R. Wigley, et al., eds., Cambridge, New York and London, Chapter 19.
Smith, D.C., and A.E. Bridges, 1982. The Brighton Market: Feeding Nineteenth Century Boston, Agricultural History, 56(1): 3-21.
W.R. Baron and David C. Smith, Growing Season Parameter Reconstruction for New England Using Killing Frost Records, 1697-1947, (Orono, Maine, Maine Agricultural Experiment Station, Bulletin 846,) November, 1994.
Smith, D.C., 1986. H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal, Yale, New Haven and London, 1986.