The landscapes of Rio de Janeiro are a product of a long history of the society interacting with the forest, with the legacies of this historical interaction being imprinted and hidden within the vegetation cover. Reading this landscape requires the following steps: 1) a comprehensive history of the process of human occupation and land uses; 2) revealing, through material evidence past human uses; 3) deciphering current ecological change, through species structure and composition (exotic species, different assemblage patterns). The requirements to accomplish these steps stem from field knowledge mainly from geography and ecology, and archival knowledge in researching historical documents. Here we highlight the importance of a multi-scalar approach, reading the landscape from a broad perspective using GIS and satellite imagery to understand the spatial distribution of the physical, ecological and social elements of the landscape.

Historical Ecology is a multidisciplinary field that studies long-term relationships between humanity and the environment. There is a missing synthesis effort to organize and present the state of the scholarship in Historical Ecology in Brazil. We aimed to characterize by whom, when, where, what, and how research in Historical Ecology has been conducted in Brazil. We made a systematic mapping of 118 scientific articles published in Portuguese, Spanish, and English that fit our inclusion criteria. The results showed articles from 1998 to May 2021, published in 79 different journals. We found 264 national and international authors (60% men and 40%women); 91% of all investigations were carried out in the Amazon and Atlantic Forest biomes. There are few works about Cerrado, Caatinga, and Pampa, and none for Pantanal. The most mentioned keywords were historical ecology, Amazon, forest, and archaeology. Twenty-three articles focused on a particular species, primarily plants; 37% of all articles used Historical Ecology as its central axis of research, and 63% as auxiliary. We found more than 35 methodological procedures, both from the social and natural sciences. This overview revealed achievements, research gaps, and opportunities in this field.