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A GEOSPATIAL ANALYSIS OF EARLY19TH-CENTURY FOREST COMPOSITION ON THE WEST GEORGIA PIEDMONT**

Abstract

This project reconstructs the early 19th century forest composition of Carroll County, Georgia using original land lot survey maps recorded between 1827-1830. These maps contain data that provides one of the earliest records of the region’s vegetation before large-scale Euro-American settlement, land-clearing, and other impacts on forest composition, such as the American chestnut blight. In a GIS, we digitized and georeferenced over 3,300 individual trees and 33 different tree species across five sub-basins of the Chattahoochee River to study variation in forest composition across different types of land and soil types. Within the full dataset, we were able to identify the abundance of different species, the top four being pine (Pinus spp., 40.6 %), oak (Quercus spp., 39.8 %), American chestnut (Castanea dentata, 7.0 %), and hickory (Carya spp., 2.9 %). Ongoing research will compare historical proportions with modern forest composition data to assess how two centuries of land-use change, disturbance, and environmental variation have reshaped the forests of the Georgia piedmont. We will also investigate potential bias introduced into the dataset by survey methods and recording practices of early surveyors, which might have preferentially recorded certain species. In addition, we are incorporating information from the surveyors’ written notes, which record chain lengths, corner post locations, and nearby landmarks. By using these measurements, we aim to refine the estimated position of the recorded trees to improve accuracy of our mapped dataset.

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