How Land Use Determines Vegetation: Evidence from a New England Sand Plain

m topography, drainage, and soil texture. Such homogeneity enabled the researchers to detect the effects of differing land-use on the structure and composition of the vegetation. Also motivating the study was the rarity of pitch pine-scrub oak communities. They support several rare plant and animal species but have been substantially degraded by industrial, commercial, and residential development, and are therefore priorities for conservation throughout the Northeast. The paleoecological record of the study area1,900 acres on a flat outwash delta composed primarily of sand and gravel-suggests that preEuropean fires were common, some of them, perhaps, ignited by a large regional Indian population. Like other sand plains in the region, the area was used for wood products from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, the Reverend Timothy Dwight, author of Travels in New England and New York (1821), described the Montague Plain and surrounding areas as "an extensive yellow pine plain covered with a lean, miserable soil." Nonetheless, 82 percent of it was subse-