Issue At Hand

As a result of decades of fire suppression, cessation of grazing, and high-grading timber practices, the prairies, savannas, and forests of the Midwest Driftless Area are experiencing succession on a massive scale.

Active management is being undertaken to restore native ecosystems, but largely without attention to historical vegetation and disturbance dynamics in the region. An understanding of ecological history can assist by providing baselines from which to assess change and by providing an understanding of the potential outcomes of management activities.

What We Hope to Accomplish

We expect to provide insights into the historic role of land use and fire on Driftless Area ecosystems. Our results will provide further knowledge of oak dynamics, and inform oak ecosystem restoration and management.

Our specific objectives are to develop:

1.   A pre Euro-American settlement baseline for on-going research on forest change and man-agement, and

2.   Realistic models of oak ecosystem change, using a historical perspective on climate change, land use, and fire dynamics.

How We Go About It

Data on pre Euro-American settlement land conditions are available from the US General Land Office's Public Land Survey (PLS) records. These data are the earliest spatially-explicit data on landscape conditions within the Driftless Area.

We will construct a map of pre-Euro-American settlement vegetation, and PLS records will be analyzed to improve understanding of fire and wind disturbance regimes within the region. Analysis of historic landscape conditions will further be integrated with current work focused on recent forest change to provide a more integrative understanding of regional vegetation dynamics.