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Data and code from: Indigenous and European-American land-use legacies in forest composition, Fort Drum, northern New York State: What do species distribution models detect across a local extent?

Tulowiecki, Stephen1

Published Apr 15, 2026 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.jsxksn0n9

Data files

Apr 15, 2026 version files 17.99 MB

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Abstract

This study aimed to evaluate how past land use shapes forest compositional patterns using fine-resolution, local-extent species distribution models (SDMs), examining whether legacies of Indigenous and European-American land-use regimes interact to influence past and present forest composition and whether proxies of past land use improve SDMs. The study was conducted at Fort Drum, northern New York State, US (434 km²), focusing on 27 tree taxa across 18 genera, including Acer, Amelanchier, Betula, Carpinus, Carya, Fagus, Fraxinus, Juglans, Ostrya, Pinus, Populus, Prunus, Quercus, Salix, Thuja, Tilia, Tsuga, and Ulmus. Species distribution models were developed for tree taxa circa 2000 using a forest inventory of 10,043 plots, and analyses incorporated original land survey records circa 1800 alongside archaeological data. Results indicated that “distance to nearest circa 1950 forest” was the most important predictor of circa 2000 tree taxon distributions, surpassing soil conditions such as moisture and pH, and its inclusion increased SDM predictive performance (mean increase in AUC = 0.025). SDMs did not strongly indicate widespread Indigenous land-use legacies in taxon distributions but revealed some relationships between archaeological sensitivity and oak and pine distributions circa 1800 and 2000. Overall, measures of past land use or land cover improved the predictive power of fine-resolution SDMs, suggesting that interacting legacies of differing land-use regimes may influence current species distributions.