PARENT SESSION
Poster Session #38: Vegetation Analysis.
Wednesday, August 7. Presentation from 5:00 PM to 6:30 PM. Exhibit Hall B & C, TCC

A GIS map of Licking County, Ohio: Vegetation at the time of the earliest government land surveys.

Becher, J.¹, Fuller, Amanda², Mulroy, Juliana^*,1, ¹ Denison University, Granville, OH² University of Wisconsin-Madison

ABSTRACT- Ohio State botanist Edgar N. Transeau and his students mapped the pre-Euroamerican settlement vegetation of most Ohio counties, culminating in the publication of Robert B. Gordon's 1966 map, Natural Vegetation of Ohio at the Time of the Earliest Land Surveys. Licking County was omitted from the Ohio State projects and the county information apparently interpolated for the statewide map. We created a digitized map of Licking County to characterize the county's pre-settlement vegetation and to analyze relationships among species, vegetation and physical features using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). To create the digital map, General Land Office records of witness trees, originally recorded between 1798 and 1830, were digitally transcribed onto a point theme in ArcView™ using a Digital Raster Graph compilation of topographic maps for Licking County as a backdrop. Additional data such as surveyor field notes were used to provide qualitative information for the county, including for areas where witness tree data were not available. Five distinct forest vegetation types (beech-maple, oak-hickory, oak-hickory-chestnut, mixed mesophytic, and elm-ash-maple swamp forest) were identified within the county. Beech-maple dominated the Wisconsian-glaciated western portion and oak-hickory and oak-hickory-chestnut dominated the unglaciated eastern portion of the county. We compare results with traditional methods of mapping using surveyor records. GIS has demonstrated great usefulness in this project because of the ability to query individual features and show relationships among layers of spatial data.

KEY WORDS: pre-settlement vegetation, geographical information systems, vegetation mapping, Ohio