Currently a Pine–Oak–Maple forest dominates the landscape, with pines the dominant conifer and maple, particularly red maple (Acer rubrum), the dominant hardwood, mainly due to fire suppression in the twentieth century. Witness tree records from the seventeenth century (the earliest reported) on Maryland’s Eastern Shore show that a mature Oak–Pine forest dominated the pre-settlement forest, with white oak (Quercus alba) the most common hardwood. Oak was the primary material for ship construction and barrel making, as well as the major fuel source. Advertisements of wood for sale or wanted also indicate a forest dominated by oak. There is no relationship between percentage of forest cover and date of advertisement, indicating little change over that time frame on settled land. Forest cover averaged 61.5% and ranged from 19.7 to 100%. Advertisements of land for sale or lease (1751–1838) show a forest primarily composed of hardwoods (86.5%), predominantly oak, with a small conifer component (13.5%). Hardwoods could not be identified further, while conifers could be grouped into what appear to be pine, cedar, and baldcypress. John Smith’s 1612 map of the Chesapeake shows a forest composed of ca. It is likely that these reports focused on trees of economic value.
Early written records (1588–1699) show forests composed of hardwoods and conifers the most commonly reported hardwoods are oak (100% occurrence in the texts), followed by walnut (93.3%), sassafras (86.7%), mulberry (80.0%), ash (60.0%), and chestnut (60.0%), and the most commonly reported conifers cedar (92.9%), pine (86.7%), and cypress (73.3%). Multiple historic sources were used to reconstruct the forests of the Chesapeake at the time of European colonization. Together, bias-correction techniques and catchment analysis greatly extend the usefulness of witness-tree data by improving methods for evaluating pre- and post-European settlement disturbance on forest change. Elevated frequencies of Carya spp., Juglans spp., and Robinia pseudoacacia, with depressed frequencies of Quercus alba, occurred on sites with a history of Native American occupation, possibly as a result of disturbance or active cultivation. We then assessed the effects of Native Americans using catchment analysis in which we tallied witness trees within 5 and 7 km of Susquehannock village sites and compared the forest composition to edaphically similar catchment areas of low Native American activity. in regions of low topographic relief and Castanea dentata in regions of high topographic relief. Pre-European settlement forests were dominated by Quercus velutina and Q. We mitigated the effects of these inconsistencies by subdividing the study area into physiographic (topographic) sections, and then subdividing each physiographic section into landform classes before witness-tree analysis. Irregularities included unequal sampling intensities among regions of contrasting topographic relief, and on a finer scale, unequal sampling among landform classes. To increase the accuracy of these data, we developed techniques to quantify and mitigate the effects of several irregularities in metes and bounds witness-tree data using Lancaster County, southeastern Pennsylvania, USA, as a model. Relatively few studies, however, have discussed surveying inconsistencies that could affect the quality of witness-tree data in Colonial metes and bounds surveys. Witness trees recorded in surveyors' notes have been extensively used to describe presettlement forest vegetation throughout eastern North America.
0 kommentar(er)
