Black Pond, Aquinnah. Vegetation History
Item Information
- Title:
- Black Pond, Aquinnah. Vegetation History
- Description:
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The landscape around Black Pond in Aquinnah was open farmland in the nineteenth century and now supports a mixture of fields, shrubs, forests, and swamps. The long-term record indicates that the area was heavily forested for the past ten thousand years. Following boreal forests of spruce (not shown) and then jack pine, the area was dominated by oaks for most of the past nine thousand years. Beech arrived around eight thousand years ago and sustained a three-thousand-year peak when it formed a diverse forest with oaks, while maple and beetlebung occupied moist sites. Myrica shrubs include sweetgale immediately around Black Pond, and bayberry on the surrounding uplands. A diverse forest continued until European deforestation, marked by the sharp decline in tree pollen and increases in grass and ragweed. Given that Black Pond is situated in an area of intensive native occupation and use over many thousands of years this record confirms that native people did not clear large areas of forest or have major impacts on the native vegetation. Charcoal values do not parallel the abundance of people on the landscape, but are greatest during the early pine period and oak-to-beech transition and were low over the past few thousand years until colonists cleared the landscape. Fire and charcoal decline in the most recent decades.
- Name on Item:
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Brian R. Hall [Compiler]
- Date:
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August 28, 2015
- Format:
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Objects/Artifacts
- Genre:
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Book illustrations
- Location:
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Harvard University
Harvard Forest Archives - Collection (local):
-
Harvard Forest Martha's Vineyard Collection
- Subjects:
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Coastal
Regional Studies
Historic and Retrospective Studies
Paleoecology
- Places:
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Dukes (county)Martha's Vineyard (island)Aquinnah
- Permalink:
- https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/vh53xt14s
- Terms of Use:
-
Copyright (c) Brian R. Hall
This work is licensed for use under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives License (CC BY-NC-ND).
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