Book chapter
New England’s Forest Landscape: Ecological Legacies and Conservation Patterns Shaped by Agrarian History
Agrarian Landscapes in Transition, pp.44-88
Oxford University Press
2008
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/111424
Abstract
A fter a regionwide two-century period of deforestation and agrarian expansion, the dramatic reduction in agriculture in New England during the past 150 years generated a wave of land-cover change. Forest cover increased from less than 30% to more than 75% in many regions. Despite supporting one of the densest human populations in the nation, New England is among the most heavily forested regions in the United States. The story of this remarkable landscape transformation is one of recovery of nature, the legacy of past events in the details of modern ecosystems, and opportunity matched by challenge for conservation. The reestablishment of forest ecosystem characteristics progressed unevenly, with compositional, structural, and functional attributes exhibiting different lags in development. In all cases, however, the modern distribution of vascular plant species, levels of forest biomass, and soil structure, chemistry, and fertility are strongly conditioned by legacies of a varied land-use history. The scale and grain of this landscape conditioning is controlled by the physical environmental template (e.g., topography, glacial geology, soils), geographical location relative to 44
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Details
- Title
- New England’s Forest Landscape: Ecological Legacies and Conservation Patterns Shaped by Agrarian History
- Creators
- David R Foster (Author)Brian Donahue (Author)Dave Kittredge (Author)Glenn Motzkin (Author)Brian Hall (Author)Billie Turner (Author)Elizabeth Chilton (Author) - Washington State University, Office of the Provost
- Publication Details
- Agrarian Landscapes in Transition, pp.44-88
- Academic Unit
- Anthropology, Department of
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Identifiers
- 99900586060501842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Book chapter