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Two primary goals of landscape ecologists are to (1) evaluate changes in ecological pattern and process on natural landscapes through time and (2) determine the ecological consequences of transforming natural landscapes to cultural ones. Paleoecological techniques can be used to reconstruct past landscapes and their changes through time; use of paleoecological methods of investigation in combination with geomorphic and paleoethnobiological data, historical records, and shorter-term ecological data sets makes it possible to integrate long-term ecological pattern and process on a nested series of temporal and spatial scales. 'Natural experiments' of the past can be used to test alternative hypotheses about the relative influences of environmental change, biological interactions, and human activities in structuring biotic communities within landscape mosaics.On the absolute time scale of the Quaternary Period, spanning the past 1.8 million years, current distributional ranges of the biota have taken shape and modern biotic communities have assembled. Quaternary environmental changes have influenced the development of natural landscapes over time scales o,f centuries to hundreds of thousands of years; human cultural evolution has resulted in the transformation of much of the biosphere from natural to cultural landscapes over the past 5,000 years. The Quaternary extends to and includes the present and the immediate future. Knowledge of landscape changes on a Quaternary time scale is essential to landscape ecologists who wish to have a context for predicting future trends on local, regional, and global scales.

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Fossil pollen assemblages from Cliff Palace Pond, Kentucky, characterize changes in forest composition through the past 9,500 years of the Holocene. Early-Holocene spruce and northern white cedar stands were replaced by mixed mesophytic forests after 7300 B.P. Hemlock declined around 4800 B.P., and eastern red cedar became locally important. After 3000 B.P, mixed oak-chestnut and pine forests were dominant. The fossil charcoal record from Cliff Palace Pond demonstrates that Late Archaic and Woodland peoples cleared forest gaps to cultivate native plants in the Eastern Agricultural Complex and that anthropogenic fires served to increase populations of fire-tolerant oaks, chestnut, and pines in upland forests of the northern Cumberland Plateau.

An early American Land Office Survey (1821) has provided a reliable basis for reconstruction of early settlement forest patterns within West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana. Application of the statistical test, analysis of variance, in the evaluation of surveyor bias in selection of bearing trees is a refinement of previous methods. Distribution of forest communities. has been delineated on the basis of edaphic and topographic relationships. A forest commumty of tupelogum and cypress occurred in the alluvial plain of the Mississippi River. U-\'land portions of West Feliciana supported a magnolia-holly-beech mixed hardwoods on thi~k loess d_eposits. A second distinct association of magnolia, beech, and holly existed in ravme and nve: lowlands of the "loess hills." Occurrence of a mixed white oak-pine-beech forest was restncted to the northeastern portion of the present parish.This study represents the first quantitative evidence to support the existence of a late-succ_essi?nal, . or. climax, magnolia-holly-beech forest in the original vegetation of upland mesic sites Withm a portion of the Gulf Coastal Plain, U.S.A.