Pre-Euro-American Forests in Northern Wisconsin:
Historical Variability at the Regional Scale
Principal investigators: Lisa Schulte, Iowa State University, Ames, IA
David Mladenoff, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI
Issue At Hand Information on historical systems is important to both scientific and management communities. Studying the past provides a deeper understanding of potential ecological relationships and provides a baseline for assessing current ecosystem trajectories. What We Hope to Accomplish In many places in North America, the pre-Euro-American settlement period is an exceptionally informative period, as it represents conditions just prior to rapid and unprecedented land use change. We characterize the vegetation and disturbance regimes during this period in northern Wisconsin using original Public Land Survey (PLS) records. |
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Our work shows much more regional-scale variability in vegetation and disturbance regimes than previous research. Maps show broad areas dominated by yellow birch and white pine in addition to eastern hemlock and sugar maple, and that jack pine had a more limited distribution than previously expected. Analysis of disturbance records show windthrow as the predominant disturbance dynamic historically structuring the regional forest. Given that long periods passed between major wind perturbations, mature to old forests of late successional species dominated. Fire was of strong sub-regional importance, however, and pine-dominated vegetation of various species and tree densities were located in these areas.
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This work was funded by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. For more information, see the following publications:
Bolliger, J., L.A. Schulte, S.N. Burrows, T.A. Sickley, and D.J. Mladenoff. 2004. Assessing ecological restoration potentials of Wisconsin (USA) using historical landscape reconstructions. Restoration Ecology 12:124-142.
Mladenoff, D. J., L.A Schulte, and J. Bolliger. 2008. Broad-scale change in the northern forests: from past to present. Chapter 5 in Waller, D., and T. Rooney, editors. The vanishing present: Wisconsin’s changing lands, waters, and wildlife. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Mladenoff, D.J., S.E. Dahir, E.V. Nordheim, L.A. Schulte, G.G. Guntenspergen. 2002. Narrowing historical uncertainty: Probabilistic classification of ambiguously identified tree species in historical survey data. Ecosystems 5:539-553.
Schulte, L.A., and D.J. Mladenoff. 2001. The original U.S. Public Land Survey records: Their use and limitations in reconstruction of pre-European settlement vegetation. Journal of Forestry 99:5-10.
Schulte, L.A. , and D.J. Mladenoff. 2005. Severe wind and fire regimes in northern Wisconsin (USA) forests: historical variability at the regional scale. Ecology 86:431-445.
Schulte, L.A. , D.J. Mladenoff, S.N. Burrows, T.A. Sickley, and E.V. Nordheim. 2005. Spatial controls of Pre-Euroamerican wind and fire in Wisconsin (USA) forests: A multiscale assessment. Ecosystems 8:73-94.
Schulte, L.A., D.J. Mladenoff, and E.V. Nordheim. 2002. Quantitative classification of a historic northern Wisconsin landscape: Mapping forests at regional scales. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 32:1616-1638.
