Estimating Historically Cleared and Forested Land in Massachusetts, USA, Using Airborne LiDAR and Archival Records

Abstract

In the northeastern United States, widespread deforestation occurred during the 17–19th centuries as a result of Euro-American agricultural activity. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, much of this agricultural landscape was reforested as the region experienced industrialization and farmland became abandoned. Many previous studies have addressed these landscape changes, but the primary method for estimating the amount and distribution of cleared and forested land during this time period has been using archival records. This study estimates areas of cleared and forested land using historical land use features extracted from airborne LiDAR data and compares these estimates to those from 19th century archival maps and agricultural census records for several towns in Massachusetts, a state in the northeastern United States. Results expand on previous studies in adjacent areas, and demonstrate that features representative of historical deforestation identified in LiDAR data can be reliably used as a proxy to estimate the spatial extents and area of cleared and forested land in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the northeastern United States. Results also demonstrate limitations to this methodology which can be mitigated through an understanding of the surficial geology of the region as well as sources of error in archival materials.

Woodland Management as Major Energy Supply during the Early Industrialization: A Multiproxy Analysis in the Northwest European Lowlands

“…The density of the kilns and their morphology are not usable for this purpose either. Indeed, based on micromorphology studies, Gebhardt [17] established that platforms can be used several times for charcoal production, blurring the morphological evidence and also, probably, the chronological indicators (charcoal pieces and sediment).…”

“…Some sources [7,16] indicate that woodland areas influenced by wood harvesting for a single charcoal kiln covered circa 100 m around the kiln. Remotesensing data (e.g., Light Detection and Ranging, LiDAR) have been tested to estimate the surface affected by this activity [17]. The content of the charcoal layer is considered to be a product of locally harvested wood [18,19] and, thus, reflects past dynamics of forest ecosystems.…”

Human‐in‐the‐loop development of spatially adaptive ground point filtering pipelines—An archaeological case study

“…Most archaeological applications use 'anonymously' classified datasets using standard processing workflows of data providers, for which often not even the metadata on data acquisition and data processing steps and settings are known. This is of course a consequence of the fact that in most archaeological projects, general purpose data are used (Banaszek et al, 2018;Bofinger & Hesse, 2011;Johnson et al, 2021;Seitsonen & Ikäheimo, 2021;Wroniecki et al, 2015), which have been classified for the corresponding original purpose (mostly general topography-based data). But even in the case of data produced specifically for an archaeological (research) project, the classification is often left to the data providers, which may produce results with sufficient quality and demanded information content.…”