Megan Shadley

October 23, 2015

Fire History in Southern New England

For decades, some ecologists and conservationists have asserted that Native Americans commonly utilized prescribed fire as a method of forest management in New England long before European settlement. Accordingly, fire would have been prevalent during peaks in human population in the middle and late Holocene, as frequent forest fires facilitated hunting and travel. Alternatively, the effects of changing vegetation and climate factors may have controlled fire by impacting fuel conditions. To date, few lake-sediment charcoal records have been available to test these hypotheses. The influx of charcoal pieces provides a proxy for the relative abundance of fire events, particularly in a localized watershed area. This past summer, I analyzed charcoal preserved in the sediments of three Massachusetts ponds: Green Pond in Montague, and Jernagen’s and Lily ponds on Martha’s Vineyard. We found that all three sites had low charcoal influx values during intervals of high human populations, suggesting that the human control of fire was less important than previously believed. Continued paleoenvironmental studies of cores from Ware Pond in Marblehead MA may yield further insights into the role of climate change in long-term variations in fire activity, as well as the role of human actions such as agriculture.