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Harvard Forest REU Symposium Abstract 2015

• Title: Long-Term History of Fire in Southern New England
• Author: Megan F Shadley (Mount Holyoke College)
• Abstract:

  For decades, some ecologists and conservationists have asserted that Native Americans commonly utilized prescribed fire as a method of forest management in New England long before European settlement (Day 1953, Abrams 1992). Accordingly, fire would have been prevalent during peaks in human population in the middle and late Holocene (Munoz et al. 2010), when large numbers of people purposefully burned forests to favor food-producing plants and to facilitate hunting and travel. Alternatively, the effects of changing vegetation and/or climate may have controlled fire by impacting fuel conditions. To date, few lake-sediment charcoal records have been available to test these hypotheses. The influx of charcoal pieces provides a proxy for the relative abundance of fire events, particularly in a localized watershed area. In this study we analyzed charcoal preserved in the sediments of three Massachusetts ponds: Green Pond in Montague, and Jernagen’s and Lily ponds on Martha’s Vineyard. The two sites on Martha’s Vineyard would have had particularly high indigenous populations during the late Holocene. We found that all three sites had low charcoal influx values during intervals of high human populations, suggesting that the human control of fire was less important than previously believed. Continued paleoenvironmental studies of cores from Ware Pond in Marblehead MA may yield further insights into the role of climate change in long-term variations in fire activity.

• Research Category: Historical and Retrospective Studies