Date of Submission
Fall 2024
Academic Program
Biology
Project Advisor 1
Cathy Collins
Abstract/Artist's Statement
Human disturbance regimes present novel and lasting impacts on the natural landscape. In the last century, a reduced agricultural dependency left Northeastern farms fallow and allowed them to reforest naturally. Although forest cover has increased, evidence of past land use persists within regenerated communities, due in part to soil depletion and the fragmentation of vegetative communities. Structural attributes such as vegetation density and aboveground biomass have started to recover in some systems, but the long-term trajectories for forest compositional stabilization remain poorly understood. I investigated tree communities in forests previously cleared for agriculture and those that were continuously wooded over the same period to identify the continuing legacies of agricultural land use in those systems. I found that large stem composition was distinct between sites that were previously cultivated fields, pastured, and woodlots. However, the composition of small stems introduced notable variation between post-agricultural sites. Comparing this study’s findings to previous surveys could provide a more comprehensive view of future community trajectories. The results of this study indicate that further study is vital to establishing conservation plans for these post-agricultural systems.
Open Access Agreement
On-Campus only
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Mennerick, William J., "Hudson Valley agricultural legacies persist despite 140 years of forest regeneration" (2024). Senior Projects Fall 2024. 19.
https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_f2024/19
This work is protected by a Creative Commons license. Any use not permitted under that license is prohibited.
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