Things that might be interesting to cover

On the MSU Natural Features website, I was reading about the different types of forests and their disturbance patterns, and one thing that stuck out to me is that while temperature/ water access and other climate features impact the type of forest and therefore the fire prevalence, the fire prevalence also impacts the type of forest. For example, in the Dry-Mesic Southern forests, “historically, frequent, low-intensity surface fires generated conditions suitable for sustaining advanced oak regeneration and helped keep oak pathogens and invertebrate acorn predators at low levels.”

This led me to question if drastically changing the frequency of low-intensity or catastrophic fire could fundamentally alter the nature of a forest. It might be interesting to look into if Native Americans were able to change the biodiversity of whole regions by impacting the fire cycle. I’m not sure exactly how we would do that, but we might be able to map out the NE forests by prevalence of fire, see if the forests ‘move’ and correlate that to Native American activity? That might take more chronological data then we have.