Document: DAV-3-18-6

The dynamic New England landscape: Understanding the present and anticipating future change in a land conditioned by history.

FOSTER, D.R.*

Harvard Forest, Harvard University ¹

Abstract:
Although ecologists tend to interpret ecosystems in relation to modern conditions and processes, it is increasingly apparent that the history of change, especially due to past land-use, strongly controls modern ecosystem structure, function, and patterns and will condition future responses to disturbance, anthropogenic stress, and environmental change. Such a melding of historical and modern process in ecological interpretation is especially warranted for temperate forest like the Eastern US, which have been transformed in recent history by human activity. These forests are critically important ecosystems at regional to global scales as they harbor a diversity of species and habitats, provide essential resources, offer important amenities to densely populated regions, and comprise key elements in global carbon budgets and concentrations of atmospheric trace gases. The surprisingly natural appearance of much of the region obscures the extent of its change over the past 350 years: the landscape was deforested and cut-over, farmed intensively through the mid 19th C, and subsequently allowed to reforest naturally over the past 150 years as agriculture shifted to the midwest and populations concentrated in urban and suburban areas. Today, the region is 60-95% forested with new, young and rapidly growing forest. Integration of this landscape's history with an understanding of ongoing land-use and environmental change is essential to address major environmental issues: the current and projected role of this vast forest region in the global carbon budget, response of these forests to stresses including enhanced atmospheric deposition of nitrogen, or disturbances including hurricanes, and conservation of uncommon plant and animal populations and critical habitats, all of which are changing at rapid rates.

Keywords: Land use, New England, Land Cover, Disturbance, History

This abstract is being presented at: 3:45 PM in session:
Symposium # 17: Land Use and Land Cover Change: The Last Century and Prospects for the 21st Century.