A Witness Tree Analysis of the Effects of Native American Indians on the Pre-European Settlement Forests in East-Central Alabama

Abstract

Witness tree data from the southeastern United States (lat 33•

Defining the spatial patterns of historical land use associated with the indigenous societies of eastern North America

“…() used a logistic regression to find that, among a number of physiographical variables, proximity to Native American settlements was the strongest predictor of the oak–hickory–chestnut community. Similar patches of anomalous forest composition have been detected in historical land surveys from other areas and associated with the presence of Native American settlements, including eastern Alabama (Foster et al ., ), south‐eastern Pennsylvania (Black & Abrams, ), north‐western Pennsylvania (Whitney & DeCant, ) and north‐eastern Wisconsin (Dorney & Dorney, ). In all these cases, the patches of managed forest are on the order of kilometres to tens of kilometres in extent, and are concentrated near Native American settlements within a heterogeneous mosaic of unmanaged ecosystem types.…”

Managing biodiversity using long-term regional data in the southeastern United States

“…Therefore, as higlighted in a series of recent publications (Dale et al, 2002;Dale et al, 2004;Dale and Polasky, 2007;Foster et al, 2004;Foster and Cohen, 2007;Foster et al, 2010;Goran et al, 2002;Olsen et al, 2007), the DoD has funded research at Fort Benning focused on identifying long-term ecological metrics, human population settlement, and human activities that may have altered the environment.…”

Landscape patterns as indicators of ecological change at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA

“…A moving window capturing the neighborhood majority value was applied iteratively to the grid to create a continuous surface of vegetation types for Fort Benning. The final step was to overlay non-forest/cleared areas, which represent large Native American settlements as estimated from archaeological evidence (Foster et al, 2004). Because the locations of smaller settlements were not known, the amount of non-forested land is underestimated on the map.…”

“…While these data are extremely generalized, the dominance of pine on the historical landscape is supported by the fact that over 90% of the soils at Fort Ben- ning can support longleaf pine (Dale et al, 2002). Furthermore, archaeological evidence suggests that Native Americans almost never cleared forests except adjacent to their settlements (Silver, 1990;Foster et al, 2004). Dramatic changes in land-cover type occurred in the 137-year period between the 1827 and the 1974 land-cover estimates.…”