Sand Plains Project Background
Historical records can tell us what happened in the past 150 years but don’t tell us how typical that is of longer time periods. We are looking at changes over the past 2000 years to get a better sense of how often fires burned, how the vegetation changed, and how minor natural changes in climate changed the patterns of fire and vegetation. To get at the ecological record of the past 2000 years we will use methods from the toolbox of paleoecologists (researchers who study ancient ecology). Paleoecologists rely on clues preserved in lake sediments to understand the past. For example, the distinctive shapes of pollen grains from different types of plants in different layers of lake sediment can be used to determine the composition of the vegetation of an area. Similarly, small charcoal fragments produced by forest fires accumulate in lakes; sediment layers with abundant charcoal indicate years with fires. Our strategy is to carefully examine the pollen and charcoal in sediment cores from dozens of small, deep lakes across the sand plain landscape. Each site will yield a unique history of vegetation and fire. Together, the records from multiple sites will allow us to create maps of how the sand plain landscape looked at various periods in the past. These maps will allow us to answer some of our questions about fire, vegetation, and climate.
Current Work
We are working with landowners and asking for their help by giving us permission to collect sediment samples from their lakes. We will be collecting two different types of information. For some lakes, our goal is only to look at the pollen and compare it to modern vegetation and to vegetation data collected in the 1850s. This part of the study will allow us to learn more about how specific forest types are reflected in the pollen records. This information will then be used to reconstruct vegetation changes over longer time periods at some sites. We intend to share the results of our work with land managers working on habitat restoration on county, state, and federal lands in the region and with ecologists working on similar studies in other regions. We would also like to share our results with the landowners whose lakes we study.
Results
We have cored ~30 lakes across the sandplain. Our analysis so far has concentrated on determining the distribution of forest types at about 1850, just before European logging and settlement. At that time the forest contained much more pine and less oak. We are currently working on extending our study of the history of the forest back in time with sediment records that extend back several thousand years.
About Us
We are academic ecologists and funding for this project is provided by the National Science Foundation, the federal granting agency for basic research in science. Our research project is motivated by our personal interest in the natural history of this region and the potential to provide important information for the restoration of sand plain ecosystems.
We take all necessary precautions to make sure that our sampling techniques do not negatively impact the lakes or surrounding areas. Working either from canoes (in the summer) or through a hole in the ice, we collect small diameter (about 3 inches) sediment cores from the deepest part of each lake. Analysis of the samples will be completed over several years.
