Project Overview
Project Overview
Utilizing historic data to reconstruct past forests
One component of the PalEON Project (paleonproject.org) involves utilizing historic data sources to reconstruct northeastern US forests during the settlement era. This data provides a snapshot of what vegetation naturally occurred in the region prior to large scale land clearing and agriculture.
Creating regional data layers
The data collected by the Notre Dame crew will go to Simon Goring, a postdoctoral researcher in Jack William's lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Simon then does some number crunching to produce GIS data layers for the entire PalEON domain that detail species composition and forest metrics such as stem density biomass on a 5-arcminute grid (~10km resolution).
An example data layer product:
Filling in the Gaps: Settlement-era oak density across the PalEON
Project Domain (dark red indicates high oak abundance). Notre Dame is
responsible for filling in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio data gaps. Figure
credit: Simon Goring.
Incorporating historical data into ecosystem models
These data layers will then be used by the ecosystem modelers in PalEON to improve terrestrial ecosystem models by using data-derived starting conditions (initialization).
Click on a state...
to learn more about the data available in that state and our current progress.
to learn more about the data available in that state and our current progress.
