9 Proceedings of the New England Society of American Foresters 84th Winter Meeting GTR-NE-314 STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN THE NEW ENGLAND LANDSCAPE DURING THE LAST 100 YEARS

During the last century, many changes have occurred to forests across New England. Current forest conditions are the expression of past activities and cultural practices. An emphasis of forest research has been identifying the condition of each state’s forest resources. The USDA Forest Service has conducted Forest Resource Inventories for each state at regular intervals since the late 1940s. During each inventory cycle, a wide range of data was collected to create a snapshot of forest conditions. From time to time, components of the inventories have been tabulated (Baldwin 1949, Irland 1982). Few studies have focused in assembling data from those inventories at a regional level to obtain a chronology of the changes during the last century, and correlate it with lumber production values for the same period. In this study, select data from every inventory of each state was assembled to depict a century of change across New England. Methods For this study, a majority of the data was in dissimilar formats. Therefore, several assumptions were necessary to develop a consistent set of data. First, the algorithms used by the USDA Forest Service to analyze data were different during each inventory. Values from a given inventory year were seldom the same when they are re-presented in subsequent publications, due to changes i