Bioclimatic, soil, terrain, distance to Native American settlement, and historical tree taxon relative abundance data at 8-km resolution for the northeastern United States

Researchers have debated impacts of past Native American land use on forests including upon tree species composition in northeastern United States (US), with estimates of impacts ranging from local to regional extent. This study examines tree relative abundances in the northeastern US (approx. 420,000 km2) to assess whether Native Americans influenced geographic distributions of 18 tree taxa prior to Euro-American settlement. We used boosted regression trees to model abundance patterns and to assess the importance of distance-based proxies of Native American land use versus environmental variables. We trained models that included and excluded distance-based proxies. Abundance estimates from original land survey records (1650-1850 CE) were acquired for taxa at 8 km spatial resolution, and related to Native American settlement locations (1500-1800 CE) and 27 environmental variables. When evaluated upon test data, regional-scale models of relative abundance that included distance-based pro...