Forest restoration would be a lot easier if people who lived a couple
of centuries ago could just tell us about the forest as they knew it. For Melissa Thomas-Van Gundy, a
U.S. Forest Service
scientist, using original land deeds from colonial America is as close
as you can get to actually being there. Based in Parsons, W.Va.,
Thomas-Van Grundy is using a
unique digitized dataset built with original land deeds to determine what a West Virginia forest looked like before European settlement. Two hundred years ago, “metes and bounds” surveys used distances from
trees, posts, rock piles or natural features to describe corners where
property line directions changed. Trees were used as markers for the
corners of a parcel, and these descriptions were included in deeds. “At the time, these trees ‘witnessed’ corners,” says Thomas-Van Grundy. “Today they are telling us even more.” The use of old deeds is not a new technique in forest research, but Thomas-Van Gundy based her
study
of what is today the Monongahela National Forest on a larger number of
points than has been used previously and used a different approach in
analyzing the data. In addition to bringing pre-settlement forests into better focus, the
study also yielded a small detail on the surveyors themselves: Colonial
Americans really knew their trees...
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