Native American Land-Use Impacts on a Temperate Forested Ecosystem, West Central New York State

Abstract

Land survey records (LSRs) describing forest species composition prior to extensive European American settlement are critical sources of information on past environmental controls of forest dynamics in eastern North America. Embedded within these historical data sources is evidence of prior Native American land use. This study expands on previous LSR-based analyses of Seneca and Iroquoian populations’ impacts on the temperate forests of west central New York State. We use an enhanced array of geospatial LSR vegetation data beyond conventional bearing tree data and implement, for the first time, combined indirect ordination of vegetation data along major environmental gradients and numerical classification of discrete upland vegetation communities. Nonmetric multidimensional scaling revealed three main drivers of vegetation dynamics in the study area: (1) fire frequency (53.7 percent of total variance); (2) soil productivity (22.6 percent variance); and (3) Native American land use (15.9 percent variance). Agglomerative hierarchical clustering reinforced the primacy of these gradients by delineating two major forest types differentiated primarily by fire frequency and secondarily by soil productivity. Seneca and Iroquoian agricultural villages were preferentially concentrated within fire-tolerant dry upland forests on high-productivity soils within the interior portion of the Lake Ontario Lowland. Fire-tolerant, dry upland forests on low-productivity soils were situated on the adjacent Appalachian Plateau, which was likely used by indigenous populations for silvicultural land-use activities. Native American disturbance of temperate forested ecosystems likely varied across the diverse culture areas of eastern North America, with the Seneca and Iroquois representing an extreme end-member within a broad continuum of anthropogenic disturbance. Key Words: forest composition, land survey records, land-use history, Native Americans, vegetation disturbance.