Prevailing Myths About Agricultural Abandonment and Forest Regrowth in the United States

Abstract

The classic story of historical land-cover change in the United States suggests that agricultural clearing in the 1800s was followed by agricultural abandonment at the turn of the twentieth century and subsequent forest regrowth—often referred to as a forest transition. Most descriptions present statistical data from historical censuses and surveys to make this case. Here we show that the historical data on cropland and forest area change for the United States need to be interpreted with care. Some earlier studies have exaggerated the extent of cropland abandonment and forest regrowth by failing to account for changes in definitions of croplands over time and changes in political boundaries in the case of forests. We reexamined the historical data to find that cropland and forest area for the United States as a whole have not undergone large-scale abandonment and regrowth but rather stabilized around the mid-twentieth century. Moreover, we find that, consistent with local and regional case studies, croplands were indeed abandoned in the eastern portions of the continent accompanied by forest regrowth, but there was compensating cropland expansion and forest clearing in the west. Our study suggests the need to exercise caution when using historical data to understand land-cover change and for developing theories such as forest transition. [Supplemental material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Annals of the Association of American Geographers for the following free supplemental resource: (1) a table of cropland harvested area for the states of the United States from 1879 to 2002.]