Author Archives: geolab

New Research and Art from the Dunes of PEI’s North Shore: Congratulations Barbara Palmer Rousseau, MA

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Rousseau and MacFadyen at the MA Island Studies celebration, UPEI, September, 2025

The GeoREACH lab’s Graduate Research Assistant Barbara Palmer Rousseau has been busy sharing her research, and her art, from the north shore of Prince Edward Island to audiences around the world this year. Perhaps most significantly, Barbara’s Master’s thesis (MA Island Studies) was successfully defended in August, 2025. The committee consisted of Drs. Joshua MacFadyen (supervisor) and Nino Andatze (member), and the external reader was Dr. Joana Gaspar de Freitas (Center for History, School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon). Many thanks to Dr. Freitas for joining us remotely from Lisbon, Portugal, and congratulations, Barbara!

The thesis has been published on UPEI’s Island Scholar website, and the accompanying ArcGIS Story Maps are now available for public viewing. These interactive websites served both as the primary source appendices for the thesis and as public-facing historical resources for anyone interested in coastal and dune histories on PEI and across Atlantic Canada.

  • Barbara Palmer Rousseau, “Shifting Sands: An Environmental History of Prince Edward Island’s Gulf Shore Dunes,” (MA Thesis, Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, 2025). https://islandscholar.ca/islandora/object/17909

Three accompanying ArcGIS Story Maps describe the changes in each of the three case studies, three contiguous coastal zones that form most of the north-east coast of Prince Edward Island:

These wonderful Story Maps are chock full of the historical maps from the PEI Public Archives and Records Office (PARO), the Island Imagined map repository, and the interactive web maps produced by the GeoREACH Lab. Thank-you to all of the students and library and archive professionals for your contributions to these map resources!

In June, her research article “Shifting Sands: Tracing the Evolution of Prince Edward Island’s Coastal Dunes” was published online in the Journal of Coastal Studies and Society: https://doi.org/10.1177/26349817251336812

Barbara has also been recognized for her art. In March, her book Finding Home at the Harbour (Island Studies Press, 2024) received the PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation’s “Creative Publication of the Year Award”: https://www.peimuseum.ca/about-us/pei-museum-heritage-awards

Her book was also featured in the May/June issue of Saltscapes Magazine. See, Jodi Delong, “Dunes and foxes and history,” Saltscapes https://www.saltscapes.com/home-cottage/3765-dunes-and-foxes-and-history.html

Also this summer, Barbara’s writing and painting about “The Fury of Fiona” was included in the Rachel Carson Centre’s Virtual Exhibition “Once Upon a Dune: Coastal (Hi)Stories”: https://www.environmentandsociety.org/exhibitions/once-upon-dune

We are going to miss Barbara in the lab and the program this year, but you can follow her work and see even more publications and art over at her blog BPRArtPEI: https://bprartpei.wordpress.com/writing/

Upcoming Gulf Ecologies Workshop (with a peek at last year’s workshop)

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The Ecologies, Knowledge, and Power in the Gulf of St. Lawrence Region c.1500-Present project is gearing up for its next summer meeting. In July 2025 the group will gather at Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB. Take a look at the meeting website here (https://projects.upei.ca/geolab/events/2025-gulf-knowledge/) and consider submitting an abstract or reaching out to Josh MacFadyen for more information.

Check out the short film recently produced by ConsiderateAgency to promote the Gulf project and our first “Gulf Ecologies” meeting held last year at the Canadian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation in St Peters, PEI. OK, 9 minutes isn’t “short” anymore, but it has some lovely shots of the facility in St Peters, the Morell River field trip, and the Basin Head beach and fisheries museum. Enjoy!

Introducing the GeoGULF Gulf of St. Lawrence Historical Map Viewer!

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Click the image above to try out GeoGULF, a new portal for exploring historical maps of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The core maps displayed in this early version are the Admiralty Charts produced by Captain Henry W. Bayfield and his staff during the St. Lawrence Survey (1827-1856).

The GeoGULF viewer can be accessed via the Gulf Ecologies project page, or with the full url: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/0474acf8e73947468593263b68a82c53.

Introducing the GeoPEI Prince Edward Island Historical Map Viewer

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Click the image above to try out the GeoPEI a new portal for exploring maps, atlases, aerial photos, and geospatial data pertaining to the history of Prince Edward Island. The GeoPEI portal takes maps that have been digitized on UPEI Robertson Library’s Island Imagined platform, and it overlays them on modern maps of PEI such as satellite images, street grids, and the latest aerial photos produced by the province. It also provides access to the Province’s aerial photographs going back to 1968 and 1935. In the future, users will also be able to find historical data such as the Island’s buildings, properties, roads, and other built infrastructure..

Users may toggle between seven historical maps and aerial photo layers, as well as the 2020 aerial photos and a number of basemaps in the ArcGIS Online viewer. Search for an address or location using the glass at the top left. Next to it are tools for measuring features and changing the basemap. Note, the default basemap (imagery hybrid) keeps the roads and place name labels above the historical layers. This is often helpful for identifying land use change. If you prefer not to see the labels, change the basemap to the plain imagery option. Happy historical mapping!

The full url to GeoPEI is https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/9870ec990eaa40069f772b7025fbd18c/, or select GeoPEI from the PEI Map Resources menu.

New Digital Project “By Muscle, Mast, and Motor: A Transportation History of Charlottetown, PEI”

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The GeoREACH Lab is excited to share a new digital mapping project created by the Director, Dr. Joshua MacFadyen and students in Applied Communications, Leadership & Culture 2090 (Digital Humanities) over the last year. 

By Muscle, Mast, and Motor: A Transportation History of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island
An ESRI Story Map by
Joshua MacFadyen and Barbara Rousseau https://arcg.is/1GjibS

The Story Map is organized around eighty sites that were either central to or symbolic of developments in the history of transportation in the greater Charlottetown area. A menu at the top brings you to six sections that explore the city through a historical map mosaic (in 1917) followed by five main ways that people traveled and transported goods from the city’s beginnings until the interwar period.

A browser preview of one section of the GeoREACH Lab Story Map, By Muscle, Mast, and Motor: A Transportation History of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

The image above offers a preview of the Story Map’s functionality. However, browsers and mobile devices will display the content differently.

Josh and co-author Barbara Rousseau are grateful to many collaborators for their inspiration, assistance, and visits to ACLC 2090, particularly from Natalie Munn at the City of Charlottetown Heritage & Planning branch. The collections and heritage professionals at UPEI’s Robertson Library, PEI’s Public Archives and Record Office, and L’Nuey were also instrumental to the Story Map.

Thank-you, again, to all who contributed; please enjoy the project and share it widely!

Coal delivery by horse and wagon, 1958. At the corner of Queen and Grafton Streets. The photo was taken by Chris Lund for the 1959  NFB Photo Story  “‘They Builded Better than They Knew’: Charlottetown: Cradle of Confederation.” Source: Library and Archives Canada / National Film Board fonds, e011176837, and  Charlottetown Stories .