Evaluating the Potential of the Original Texas Land Survey for Mapping Historical Land and Vegetation Cover

Indumathi Srinath,Andrew Millington

doi:10.3390/land5010004

Abstract

This paper reports on research to evaluate the potential of Original Texas Land Survey (OTLS) to generate information that can be used to quantitatively map historical vegetation cover and analyse pertinent aspects of vegetation ecology. Research was conducted in Brazos County in east-central Texas. OTLS data are easy to acquire and convert to geo-referenced autecological information. Reconstructing and mapping vegetation and land cover, conducting vegetation- and species-site analyses with to soil-ecological maps, reconstructing vegetation assemblages and forest structure can be easily accomplished. Due to the irregular surveying framework used by OTLS, mapping gradational grassland-savannah ecotone boundaries is impracticable.

Highlights

Reconstructions of vegetation prior to significant landscape alteration provide critical baseline information for ecologists and land change scientists [1,2,3]
Individual surveyor’s notes were photographed before decoding to enable difficult handwriting to be interpreted when the information was reviewed at the Texas General Land Office (TGLO) (The majority of the documents related to original land grants are available through an online search engine)
The potential of Original Texas Land Survey (OTLS) data was assessed in the context of mapping reconstructed vegetation, and selected aspects of plant ecology

Summary

Introduction

Reconstructions of vegetation prior to significant landscape alteration provide critical baseline information for ecologists and land change scientists [1,2,3]. The land surveys that were carried out in North America at this time are a valuable archive of vegetation observations [5,6,7,8]. They have been used to reconstruct historical vegetation cover and forest composition in North America [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19] as well as other aspects of vegetation ecology, in particular the effects of disturbance [17,20,21,22,23,24,25,26] and vegetation-soil relationships [27,28,29,30,31,32,33]. The research reported on in this paper focuses on savannah woodlands and grasslands in east-central

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Conclusion