Historic Natural Community

When developing restoration plans the challenge can be to determine the historic natural community; as in, what would be the condition if humans didn’t manipulate/disturb the site. Fortunately, we have a number of tools and scientific resources to guide our determination of historic natural communities. Plus, to a trained eye, we can often see relics of the historical condition in the current landscape!

Using airphoto interpretation, survey notebooks from the 1890s, and relics on the landscape, we were able to recreate the historical natural vegetation community pre-settlement. We used this information to inform our restoration practices.