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6 Forest History of the Highlands Emily W. B. (Russell) Southgate Why Study Forest History? European settlers who began exploring the Highlands more than three hundred years ago found seemingly limitless forests, ripe for exploitation. Over the next century and a half, they cleared forests to make farms and harvested trees to provide fuel and building materials. From their perspective, they were converting a wilderness into productive land (Cronon 1983). From another perspective, however, the destruction that they visited on these forests was unprecedented in extent, severity, and duration as compared with any disturbances in the preceding eight thousand years, if ever, and the destruction happened at an astonishing rate. Highly destructive fires raged on cutover lands. The discovery of more easily cultivated land farther west, improved transportation, cheaper fuels than charcoal and wood, and more extensive unlogged forests led to abandonment of many of these destructive activities by 1900, and to the recovery of forests in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a result, extensive but young forests characterize much of the Highlands in the early twenty-first century. In this chapter, I will discuss the long history of the forests before European settlers arrived and the forest conditions and processes that have changed since they arrived. This perspective will provide a backdrop for considering the distribution of forest types and other vegetation today, which are a consequence not only of climate, physiography, and soils but also of past human actions. Historical studies show how vegetation has responded to changes in climate and disturbance regimes. Understanding these responses gives us critical insight into ecological processes and greatly improves our ability to address the potential impacts of current and predicted future changes in the environment (Russell 1997; Foster and Aber 2004). Have the activities of the last few centuries altered substrates, seed sources, and other conditions such that reconstruction of precolonial forest composition is unlikely? Do the patterns of forests today reflect those of the past, or are they changed in significant ways? 108 Emily W. B. (Russell) Southgate Are there disturbance factors, such as fire, that characterized precolonial forests but are absent today and need to be restored? Deciphering which features of forests have been robust in the face of disturbances and which have not will help foresters and land managers make better decisions about future forest management. Classical ecology posited a “climax” vegetation type that was in equilibrium with climate (Clements 1936). While this concept has been greatly modified over the last century, paleoecological research does indeed support the notion that, given sufficient response time, vegetation is in equilibrium with climate (Webb 1986; Parshall and Foster 2002; Webb, Shuman, and Williams 2004; Patterson 2005). However, in contrast to the Clementsian idea of plant communities acting as coherent units, paleoecological evidence strongly supports the individualistic theories of plant community organization, with each species responding to slightly different climate signals (Gleason 1926; Grimm and Jacobson 2004). In addition, on a local scale, species respond to more local changes such as erosion or disease at a more rapid rate, which confounds simplistic predictions about species responses to climate (Davis and Shaw 2001; Webb, Shuman, and Williams 2004). Historical studies allow us to evaluate the responses of forest vegetation to major disturbance events such as deforestation and forest recovery or loss of major species due to disease, and the importance of chronic disturbance events such as fire. These drivers of change act on different spatial and temporal scales and leave legacies that last for differing times. History can be used to establish analogues, or sets of conditions, that management seeks to create or maintain. In North America, this analogue is often taken to be the conditions that existed before European settlers arrived on the continent, regarded as the “natural” vegetation. However, the question of what is “natural” is not a simple one (Willis and Birks 2006) and relies on a historical perspective. For example, the extent of Native American impact on the pre-Columbian forest vegetation of the Highlands may confound the interpretation of the vegetation as in equilibrium with nonhuman drivers. In addition, climate has changed as the Northern Hemisphere has recovered from the Little Ice Age cooling of 1450–1850, so conditions in 2000 are naturally warmer than they were in 1700, even without anthropogenic (humancaused ) climate warming. In this chapter, I will address several specific questions as well as other more general issues. First, what is the evidence that the forest vegetation of the Highlands region has...

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