This figure comes from my graduate research into the historical forests of New England. It is part of a larger research project focused on creating 3D models of pre-colonial forest structure and studying how Indigenous and colonial land use practices impacted the forests.

The left side of the figure shows the percentage of fire-adapted (also referred to as "pyrophilic") trees present in archival data used to reconstruct the forest composition of the Northeastern U.S. prior to European colonization. The blue area represents the Tension Zone Line (TZL) that separated the fire-adapted forests to the south from the conifer-northern-hardwood forests to the north. The archival data are referred to as "witness trees" and have been compiled from early colonial land surveyor notes. You can learn more about the data and download it here.

The right side of the figure shows contemporary land cover classification (2023) in the landscape of the Great Bay Estuary, which was the target landscape for my research. The data comes from the USGS EROS LCMAP CCDC Products available here.