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The forests of the midwestern United States at Euro-American settlement: Spatial and physical structure based on contemporaneous survey data
- Source :
- PloS one, vol 16, iss 2, PLoS ONE, Vol 16, Iss 2, p e0246473 (2021), PLoS ONE
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- eScholarship, University of California, 2021.
-
Abstract
- We present gridded 8 km-resolution data products of the estimated stem density, basal area, and biomass of tree taxa at Euro-American settlement of the midwestern United States during the middle to late 19th century for the states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana. The data come from settlement-era Public Land Survey (PLS) data (ca. 0.8-km resolution) of trees recorded by land surveyors. The surveyor notes have been transcribed, cleaned, and processed to estimate stem density, basal area, and biomass at individual points. The point-level data are aggregated within 8 km grid cells and smoothed using a generalized additive statistical model that accounts for zero-inflated continuous data and provides approximate Bayesian uncertainty estimates. The statistical modeling smooths out sharp spatial features (likely arising from statistical noise) within areas smaller than about 200 km2. Based on this modeling, presettlement Midwestern landscapes supported multiple dominant species, vegetation types, forest types, and ecological formations. The prairies, oak savannas, and forests each had distinctive structures and spatial distributions across the domain. Forest structure varied from savanna (averaging 27 Mg/ha biomass) to northern hardwood (104 Mg/ha) and mesic southern forests (211 Mg/ha). The presettlement forests were neither unbroken and massively-statured nor dominated by young forests constantly structured by broad-scale disturbances such as fire, drought, insect outbreaks, or hurricanes. Most forests were structurally between modern second growth and old growth. We expect the data product to be useful as a baseline for investigating how forest ecosystems have changed in response to the last several centuries of climate change and intensive Euro-American land use and as a calibration dataset for paleoecological proxy-based reconstructions of forest composition and structure for earlier time periods. The data products (including raw and smoothed estimates at the 8-km scale) are available at the LTER Network Data Portal as version 1.0.
- Subjects :
- 0106 biological sciences
Michigan
Plant Science
Forests
01 natural sciences
Geographical locations
Basal area
Trees
Midwestern United States
Biomass
Biomass (ecology)
Multidisciplinary
geography.geographical_feature_category
Ecology
Statistical Models
Statistics
Eukaryota
Aerial
Plants
Old-growth forest
Terrestrial Environments
010601 ecology
Grasslands
Physical Sciences
Medicine
Research Article
Public land
Forest Ecology
Ecological Metrics
Life on Land
General Science & Technology
Science
Climate change
010603 evolutionary biology
Ecosystems
Spatio-Temporal Analysis
Oaks
Forest ecology
Plant Communities
geography
Land use
Plant Ecology
Ecology and Environmental Sciences
Organisms
Biology and Life Sciences
Bayes Theorem
Plant Components, Aerial
United States
North America
Secondary forest
Physical geography
Plant Components
People and places
Mathematics
Subjects
Details
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- PloS one, vol 16, iss 2, PLoS ONE, Vol 16, Iss 2, p e0246473 (2021), PLoS ONE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....6ba591260a7e5ee74d714c166b16e64e