Forest Dynamics and Historical Land Use in Northeastern North America

Forests in northeastern North America have undergone profound transformations since pre-settlement times, driven primarily by human land use and compounded by natural drivers. Early Euro-American surveys describe expansive mixedwood and boreal forests dominated by species such as spruce, fir and eastern white cedar. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, logging, agricultural clearance and settlement-related fires reshaped disturbance regimes, favouring pioneer and disturbance-adapted trees at the expense of long-lived, shade-tolerant taxa. The resultant landscape is more homogeneous in composition and structure, with many historic forest types now lost or confined to isolated refugia. Contemporary research combines settlement-era survey records with modern forest inventories, dendrochronology and spatial modelling to reconstruct past forest composition, quantify above-ground biomass changes and map shifts in species distributions. These efforts reveal that anthropogenic disturbance has exerted a stronger influence on compositional change than observed climate trends, while also modulating forest responses to future warming and altered moisture regimes. Insights from this region inform global debates on sustainable management, landscape restoration and the resilience of temperate and boreal woodlands under ongoing environmental change.

Research from Nature Portfolio

Recent studies confirm that long-term shifts in tree assemblages are dominated by human disturbance rather than direct climatic forcing. By comparing extensive nineteenth-century species lists with modern inventories across eastern Canada, researchers demonstrated that land-use driven transitions towards disturbance-adapted species far exceed compositional changes attributable to temperature or moisture shifts. This work emphasises that legacy effects of harvesting and settlement fires will continue to shape forest trajectories and influence how these ecosystems respond to future climate pressures.

Forest Dynamics and Historical Land Use in Northeastern North America publication trend

The graph below shows the total number of articles in forest dynamics and historical land use in northeastern north america across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).

Technical terms

Anthropogenic disturbance: Human-caused alterations to ecosystems, including logging, land clearance and ignited fires.

Public Land Survey System (PLSS): A nineteenth-century framework for surveying and recording land and tree data in North America.

Forest composition: The relative abundance and arrangement of tree species within a forest community.

Above-ground biomass: The total mass of living vegetation above the soil surface, typically expressed as weight per unit area.

Basal area: The cross-sectional area of tree stems at breast height per unit ground area, used to estimate stand density.

Mixedwood forest: A forest type characterised by co-occurring coniferous and deciduous tree species.

Disturbance regime: The pattern, frequency and intensity of disturbances (such as fire, windthrow and harvesting) that shape ecosystem structure over time.

References

1. Stronger influence of anthropogenic disturbance than climate change on century-scale compositional changes in northern forests. Nature Communications (2019).
2. Statistically-Estimated Tree Composition for the Northeastern United States at Euro-American Settlement. PLOS ONE (2016).
3. Composition Changes in the Boreal Mixedwood Forest of Western Quebec Since Euro-Canadian Settlement. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (2020).
4. Forest Transformation Following European Settlement in the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean Valley in Eastern Québec, Canada. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution (2020).