Indigenous and European-American Land-Use Legacies in Forest Composition, Fort Drum, Northern New York State: What Do Species Distribution Models Detect Across a Local Extent?

Aim

How consequential is past land use in shaping forest compositional patterns as inferred through fine resolution, local-extent species distribution models (SDMs)? Do legacies of Indigenous and European-American land-use regimes interact and influence past and present forest composition? Do proxies of past land use improve SDMs?

Location

Fort Drum, northern New York State, US (434 km²).

Taxa

27 tree taxa across 18 genera: Acer, Amelanchier, Betula, Carpinus, Carya, Fagus, Fraxinus, Juglans, Ostrya, Pinus, Populus, Prunus, Quercus, Salix, Thuja, Tilia, Tsuga and Ulmus.

Methods

Development of Species Distribution Models (SDMs) of Tree Taxa Circa 2000 Recorded in a Forest Inventory (n = 10,043 Plots), and Analysis of Original Land Survey Records Circa 1800 in Conjunction with Archaeological Data.

Results

‘Distance to nearest circa 1950 forest’ was the most important predictor in SDMs of circa 2000 tree taxon distributions, more so than soil conditions such as soil moisture and pH. This predictor increased the predictive performance of SDMs of distributions circa 2000 (e.g., mean increase in AUC = 0.025). SDMs did not suggest that past Indigenous land-use legacies extensively existed within taxon distributions, but they detected some relationships between archaeological sensitivity, oak and pine circa 1800 and 2000.

Main Conclusions

Measures of land use or past land cover improve the predictive power of fine resolution SDMs, and interacting legacies of differing land-use regimes may shape current species distributions.