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What were forests like at the time of European settlement?
In the eastern forests of the United States, changing climate and land-use are affecting forested ecosystems in ways that will have important economic and ecological consequences for centuries. In order to inform land management decisions affecting the trajectories of these changes, we need to develop reliable forecasting and assessment tools.
To fully understand how these forests are changing, we need to understand their history. Our research team based in the McLachlan Lab at the University of Notre Dame works to digitize and aggregate historical forest survey data from the early 19th century in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. See the Project Overview for more information.
As part of the PalEON Project, this work will contribute to regional reconstructions of these forests over the past 2000 years.
The PaleoEcological Observatory Network
PalEON is an interdisciplinary team of paleoecologists, environmental statisticians, and ecosystem modelers with the goal of producing rigorous and robust reconstructions of past ecological variables for the purpose of initializing and validating terrestrial ecosystem models. Read more about the larger PalEON Project at paleonproject.org.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 1065702. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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