Nature Next Door: Cities and Trees in the American Northeast

A Note on the Maps

xix The forest cover maps and reforestation statistics in this volume draw on data from multiple sources, the most important of which are Charles S. Sargent’s Report on the Forests of North America (exclusive of Mexico), Tenth Census of the United States, 1880 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1884) and the U.S. Forest Service’s National Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) Databases, accessible through the “Forest Inventory Data Online (FIDO) system, at http://apps.fs.fed.us/fido. Additional information for each of the individual states draws on both the secondary sources and the federal and state forest surveys and reports that are cited in the endnotes. The maps and statistics presented here should be understood as illustrative , not as numerical representations of precise changes in numbers of trees, since methods of gathering and expressing information about forest cover have changed dramatically since 1880, when Charles Sargent wrote to local officials across the country, asking them to estimate the extent of forests in their counties. Also, since early information on the extent of forest cover was most often reported at the county level, the maps for both the early and the later years are based on county-level information. Artist Rachel Hope Allison translated the county-by-county data into works A Note on the Maps xx m acknowledgments of art to convey the scale and scope of the changes in forest cover over the course of the twentieth century. The location maps in each of the chapters are her artwork as well. Nature Next Door ...