Mid-19th Century Land Use on the Southern New England and New York Coasts 1832-1886

The widespread influence of land use and natural disturbance on population, community, and landscape dynamics and the long-term legacy of disturbance on modern ecosystems requires that a historical, broad-scale perspective become an integral part of modern ecological studies and conservation assessment and planning. In previous studies, the Harvard Forest Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) program has developed an integrated approach of paleoecological and historical reconstruction, meteorological modeling, air photo interpretation, GIS analyses, and field studies of vegetation and soils, to address fundamental ecological questions concerning the rates, direction, and causes of vegetation change, to evaluate controls over modern species and community distributions and landscape patterns, and to provide critical background for conservation and restoration planning. In the current study, we extend this approach to investigate the link between landscape history and the abundance, distribution, and dynamics of species, communities and landscapes of the Cape Cod to Long Island coastal region, including the islands of Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and Block Island. The study region includes many areas of high conservation priority that are linked geographically, historically, and ecologically. This data package includes GIS layers digitized by Harvard Forest researchers from copies of the US Coastal Survey “T-Sheet” maps available from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The US Coastal Survey, and then the US Coast and Geodetic Survey mapped the region, or specific parts of it, several times between 1832 and the 1960s. In this project we digitized the earliest T-Sheet available for each location. The original maps were surveyed between 1832 and 1886, with most of them made between 1835 to 1855. The original maps showed features such as roads, farm walls, railroads, buildings, some industrial buildings, saltworks, wharfs, and land cover including woodlands, sandplains, grasslands, open agricultural fields, cultivated areas, fruit tree orchards, wetlands, etc. Many sheets had symbols which differentiated conifer trees from hardwoods. There were some inconsistencies in what features were mapped or how they were drawn between the original T-Sheets. Since we digitized the maps over the course of several different research projects, we did not always digitize all of the same features in each geographic area, therefore users of this data are encouraged to look at scans of the original T-Sheets for their specific areas of interest (links below). We always digitized land cover and roads and occasionally buildings and fences as mentioned in the datasets below.