Change on a northern Wisconsin landscape: Legacies of human history

Landscape patterns embody the layered legacies of past geologic, climatic, vegetative, and human events and processes. This dissertation focuses on the landscape legacies of the human past. My research builds on existing studies that demonstrate the persisting effects of past land use on vegetative change. I investigate how spatially-precise and spatially-amorphous facets of the human past have directed landscape change in northern Wisconsin. Collectively, these studies demonstrate that both land ownership characteristics and events associated with economic, cultural, and political history can introduce persisting influences on landscape change at time-scales of a half-century or more.; This research reveals new historical insights about the Great Lakes cutover. I show how local-scale economic, political, and cultural factors interrelated with broad-scale biophysical factors to direct heterogeneous courses of landscape change on the Lake Superior clay plain. This study also highlights the distinct history of the Bad River Band, an Ojibwe community, during the cutover era.; Eastern white pine (Pinus strobus L.) experienced strong reproduction after the cutover in some sites, in contrast to the common explanation that the cutover permanently caused this species to decline across the Great Lakes region. On the Bad River Reservation, strong seedling establishment occurred in the 1930s and 1940s. However, analyses of land cover composition at three dates after initial forest clearance (1930, 1951, and 1987) show that this species never reemerged as a dominant canopy species on the reservation during the 20th century. Forest management practices, especially pulpwood forest management, contributed to this forest ecological change. Land cover change differed in relation to management history: former pine sites on the Indian reservation, where pulpwood harvest predominated, usually became aspen (Populus spp.)-paper birch ( Betula papyrifera); off-reservation sites, where agricultural or other non-industrial forest management predominated, became agriculture-grassland more often than reservation sites.; This dissertation also models ways to conduct cross-disciplinary research that bridges environmental history and landscape ecology. I demonstrate ways to integrate human historical factors, such as culture, into landscape ecological analyses, using historical data and methods. Conversely, I model an approach to incorporate spatially-precise, quantitative measures of landscape pattern into historical narratives.