We're proud to announce that our doctoral student Zuzana Siudová (third from the left in the pic below) won 2nd prize in the MA thesis competition of the Czech National Agricultural Museum. Congrats!👏🎉
www.nzm.cz/o-nas/aktual...

Yesterday we had a pleasant and fruitful workshop of like-minded researchers from three projects (INFEST, Vienna - CONCRIS, Brno - REFRESH, Ostrava) in Brno. Looking forward to further collaboration on 19th-century forests and forestry!
@maschmid.bsky.social @simonegingrich.bsky.social

The petitions range from sophisticated and self-assured (by wealthier peasants) to naive and desperate (by members of the rapidly expanding poorer layers of peasantry - they could usually read and write at this point, see pic, but observe how unsure much of the handwriting is)

The first Bohemian statistical work (published in 1885) already contained maps as well.

From the mid-1870s, the Austrian Ministry of Agriculture also started to publish official forest statistics, including details on, for example, offences against forest law. As the picture shows, in 1874 Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia gave more than one third of all cases.

Forest statistics proper (rather than descriptions of forests in tax conscriptions for example) on a larger than local basis were first prepared in Moravia with the help of questionnaires. The results were published in the journal of Moravian and Silesian foresters in the 1850.

Nonetheless, altogether they provide a huge mass of data! Here's a picture of the person behind it all: Emil Hošek (1923-2000). As the uniform also shows, he was (like most authors of individual volumes) originally trained as a forester not as a historian.

An excellent source of information on changes in tree species composition (and other things) in the 19th-20th centuries is the unpublished volumes of the so-called Historical forest research (Historický průzkum lesů) stored at the archives of the Czech Forestry Institute. Below is an example.