Historic Landcover of Southern Ontario
It's National Forest Week and National Tree Day! To celebrate, we're highlighting a geospatial dataset representing Southern Ontario's historic (pre-European settlement) forest landcover.
Our featured dataset (depicted above) was created by former Map & Data Library staff member, Dr. Sadia Butt. This dataset began as surveyor field notes from 1793 to 1850. These surveyors walked concession lines, recording the vegetation they saw. In 1973, Peter Findlay created paper maps based on those field notes. Dr. Butt converted the data from those maps into geospatial data in 2002, with updates and corrections in 2016 and 2023. Now this publicly available dataset makes historic vegetation data available for southern Ontario.
Downloads:
- Geospatial data: Historic Landcover of Southern Ontario: Pre-European Settlement
- Print maps of historic vegetation
Data quality notes:
- Data away from concession lines are interpolated
- Genus-level, not species-level, identification for some trees (e.g., oak, maple)
See also:
- Professor Danijela Puric-Mladenovic's pre-settlement vegetation research combines historical information with statistical modelling to predict and map what southern Ontario's vegetation looked like before the clear-cutting and farming during European settlement