Investigating the Reforestation of Anthropogenic Landscapes through Remote Sensing

Summary

While New England is today a mostly forested landscape, up to 80% of this region was deforested during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for agricultural land-use. As the rural economy of New England shifted to a more urban and industrial one, much of this agricultural land was abandoned and subsequently reforested. The vestiges of this once rural landscape can now best be seen in LiDAR imagery, in which features such as stonewalls are particularly well discernible. Though the spatial and temporal dimensions of reforestation vary across the region, this paper investigates the extent to which the forest vegetation present today reflects the legacy of land-use evidenced by historical documents and LiDAR imagery. Using these data to precisely identify areas of prior deforestation and intensive land-use, the forest vegetation now present is analyzed through historic CORONA and modern high resolution multispectral satellite imagery to track the progress of reforestation as well as investigate spectral properties that are unique to such areas. In doing so, the legacy of deforestation and abandonment in New England can be better understood, and new tools provided for the study of this landscape in areas where stonewalls are not as frequent or well preserved.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20137