* In honor of Archaeology Awareness Month, enjoy a lecture by Great Lakes archaeologist Dan Melone as he discusses the Native people of
presettlement Chicago.
Witness trees are an invaluable source of quantitative data on
presettlement conditions where much or all original forests have been cleared.
Both Bob and Don feel that with less than 5 percent of the old-growth
presettlement forests remaining, we have much to learn from what's left.
In the
presettlement period it provided water both for Native people and for the teeming buffalo herds.
While woodland restoration projects typically focus on improving degraded woodlands to more closely resemble
presettlement conditions, fewer studies have attempted to understand the process of transforming highly-altered, suburban lawn-dominated landscapes back into a healthy forest ecosystem.
Four biological factors (spawning, larval duration, vertical behaviors, and
presettlement mortality) are proposed to influence larval dispersal.
Importantly, federal actors provided no
presettlement information about
Indianapolis was almost entirely forested in pre-European
presettlement times, but forests were reduced to 13% cover by the late 1900s (Barr et al.
The climate of Illinois likely permits fire as Wright suggested (1968), but the large population of people in
presettlement times probably increased the frequency of ignition as it did in Minnesota (Grimm 1984).
Increasing fuel loads, higher summer temperatures, prolonged late summer droughts and decreasing fuel moistures are combining to create circumstances in which wildfires that escape containment in YPMC forests can burn at much higher severity over larger areas in extreme weather conditions than was common under the
presettlement fire regime (Mallek et al.
The bobcat is native to Georgia and was likely found on Cumberland Island during
presettlement times; however, it does not now occur on any of the other Georgia barrier islands.
Because these dense stands are vulnerable to high-intensity wildfires, managers of ponderosa pine forests in the American Southwest have responded by attempting to restore
presettlement stand structure and return low-intensity fire to this fire-adapted landscape (Allen et al., 2002).