Land use history (1840–2005) and physiography as determinants of southern boreal forests

Abstract

Land use history has altered natural disturbance dynamics, causing widespread modifications of the earth's forests. The aim of this study is to reconstruct a regional, spatially-explicit, fire and logging history for a large southern boreal forest landscape (6,050 km 2 ) of eastern Canada. We then examined the long-term influence of land use history, fires, and physiographical gradients on the area's disturbances regimes, present-day age structure and tree species composition. Spatially-explicit fire (1820-2005) and logging histories were reconstructed from forestry maps, terrestrial forest inventories and historical records (local newspapers, travel notes, regional historical reviews). Logistic regression was used to model the occurrence of major boreal tree species at the regional scale, in relation to their disturbance history and physiographical variables. The interplay of elevation and fire history was found to explain a large part of the present-day distribution of the four species studied. We conclude that human-induced fires following the colonization activities of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have increased fire frequency and the dominance of fire-adapted species at lower elevations. At higher elevations, the low historical fire frequency has fostered the dominance of fire-sensitive species. Twentieth-century forestry practices and escaped settlement fires have generated a forest landscape dominated by younger forest habitats than in presettlement times. The expected increase of wildfire activity in North America's eastern boreal forest, in conjunction with continued forest management, could have significant consequences on the resilience of boreal forests.

Potential change in the distribution of an abundant and wide-ranging forest salamander in a context of climate change

“…Low urbanization and a poorly developed road network could also have limited surveys and led to an underestimation of the species' abundance. Moreover, given that P. cinereus is sensitive to forest disturbances (deMaynadier and Hunter 1995), intense logging and recurrent fires in boreal forests in the northern part of the species' range (Stocks et al 2002, Bouchard and Pothier 2011, Boucher et al 2014 could have created large areas of unsuitable habitats for this species. In northern areas such as the Hudson Plains (Fig.…”

People and pines 1555–1910: integrating ecology, history and archaeology to assess long-term resource use in northern Fennoscandia

“…Axelsson et al 2002;Ericsson et al 2005;Jönsson et al 2009;Josefsson et al 2010c;Lie et al 2012). The momentum of the early commercial logging and its effects on ecosystems are very similar to the early logging era in eastern North America (Boucher et al 2009;Flatley et al 2013;Boucher et al 2014). In both cases, the early logging is foreboding the large scale landscape transformation due to modern forestry in the twentieth century (Ö stlund et al 1997).…”

The introduction of modern forest management and clear-cutting in Sweden: Ridö State Forest 1832–2014

“…The latter method is particularly robust since it covers a long period and can be used at different spatial levels. Detailed and consecutive historical records have been used to study the history of forest use and management in Switzerland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Bürgi 1999), how modern forest management transformed a beech-dominated forest landscape in Sweden from 1840 to 2010 (Brunet et al 2012), changes in tree species composition in private and state forests in Denmark from 1800 to 1950 (Serup 2005), logging history of a boreal forest in eastern Canada from 1840 to 2005 (Boucher et al 2014), and the introduction of large-scale logging and overall forest transformation in a boreal forest landscape in Sweden (Ö stlund et al 1997). In this study, we present data from Ridön, an island located in Lake Mälaren in the county of Södermanland, central Sweden.…”