Using John Muir’s 1911 sketches to reconstruct a century of change in an Araucaria forest in Chile

Background/Question/Methods

John Muir – botanist, geologist, nature writer, and a founding father of U.S. nature conservation – traveled alone to Chile in 1911, at the age of 73, because he wanted to see native forests of Araucaria araucana, the Monkey Puzzle Tree. Muir never wrote about this last ecological expedition of his amazing life before his death in 1914. We used his sparse journal notes and sketches to reconstruct his route to the slopes of Volcán Tolhuaca in central Chile, and to locate the site in an Araucaria forest where he camped and sketched. We compared his sketches with the modern forest at the site, and used limited tree coring and dendrochronology to understand forest change during the past century.

Results/Conclusions

At the site where Muir camped and sketched we found a dense, multi-aged Araurcaria forest, in stark contrast to the open stand of old trees he sketched. By determining the ages of young trees now blocking the views Muir sketched, we concluded that his sketches were an accurate record of the open forest he saw, and that ecological change to the current dense forest is probably due to a reduction in grazing, logging, and fire in the past century. We found that Muir’s historic visit to Chile is completely unknown to most Chileans, and that he had unknowingly been on the edge of the first forest protected area in Chile and in Latin America. We are currently using our research findings to encourage the recognition and conservation of the site of Muir’s 1911 visit.