THE UNITED-STATES GENERAL LAND OFFICE SURVEY AS A BASIS FOR BIOGEOGRAPHY EXERCISES

The U.S. General Land Office Survey is perhaps the only general source of data for reconstruction of local presettlement vegetation patterns in most of the United States. It is also a convenient basis for student exercises in introductory university biogeography courses because it eases many of the practical constraints of field data collection. I illustrate use of the survey by describing a sequence of three exercises developed for a recent biogeography course at Indiana University, Indianapolis. Exercise 1 uses survey witness-tree records to correlate tree distributions with environmental variables and to evaluate spatial interaction between species. Exercise 2 reconstructs physiognomic vegetation patterns and forest composition from witness-tree records and surveyors’ plat maps. Exercise 3 is a field comparison of present human-altered vegetation patterns with the original patterns described by the survey. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.