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Assessing Naturalness in Northern Great Lakes Forests Based on Historical Land-Cover and Vegetation Changes

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Abstract

The concept of naturalness was developed to assess to what degree landscapes represent a natural state. Protected areas are often regarded as the remnants of untouched landscapes although many landscapes commonly perceived as pristine have a long history of human impact. Here, we introduced a historical perspective into the concept of naturalness and the analysis of the effectiveness of protected areas by analyzing historical trajectories in land-cover and forest communities for the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (USA). Distribution of land-cover and forest community types was reconstructed for pre-settlement time (around 1850), the height of agricultural expansion (1928), and modern conditions (2000). Naturalness of the landscape was assessed by analyzing similarity between pre-settlement and current conditions and by assessing landscape continuity (1850–1928–2000). We compared changes in the strictly protected park core zone with those in the inland buffer zone with ongoing sustainable logging, and a not protected area adjacent to the park. Forest was the dominant land-cover type over the entire study period. We detected a gradient in land-cover continuity from the core zone (81 % continuity) to the inland buffer zone (74 %) and the area outside the park (66 %). Northern hardwood was the dominating forest type in all time points with high continuity (76 %). In contrast, pine forests show a more dynamic pattern with more than 50 % of the initial forests switching to non-forest or early succession forest types by 1928. More than half of the study area was considered as “natural virgin” (no changes in land-cover and forest community type) with a higher portion within the park than in the adjacent area. In contrast, areas with low naturalness are more abundant outside the park. Our study demonstrates the value of integrating historical information into naturalness assessments and the results provide useful information for future park management. More broadly speaking, our study advances research on the effectiveness of protected areas, by going beyond simple measures of averted deforestation, and introducing approaches to directly measure naturalness.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge support by the National Park Service’s Great Lakes Inventory and Monitoring Program. Comments by three anonymous reviewers and the editor greatly strengthened our manuscript. D. Mladenoff and his team supported the work by sharing their experience of working with GLO data. We also thank S. Schmidt and D. Helmers for their GIS support. Further, we appreciated the help from the National Park Service staff at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Unit Landscape Dynamics, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Zürcherstrasse 111, 8903, Birmensdorf, Switzerland

    Urs Gimmi

  2. Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1630 Linden Drive, Madison, WI, 53706, USA

    Urs Gimmi & Volker C. Radeloff

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  1. Urs Gimmi
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  2. Volker C. Radeloff
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Correspondence to Urs Gimmi.

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Gimmi, U., Radeloff, V.C. Assessing Naturalness in Northern Great Lakes Forests Based on Historical Land-Cover and Vegetation Changes. Environmental Management 52, 481–492 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-013-0102-0

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