A Historical Hike through the Forests of Waterloo Region
A Historical Hike through the Forests of Waterloo Region
1843 Vegetation Survey of Waterloo Region
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Early Vegetation Survey Methods
Pre-settlement vegetation maps were created from early survey notes recorded by W.Walker from 1842 to 1843 of the Townships of Wellesley, Wilmot, and North Dumfries.
Archives of handwritten field notes and transcribed maps are uncommonly used in modern research, though they offer an interesting glimpse into the landscape and ways of life back in the days.
Historical Vegetation Map
This scanned, vegetation survey map for the Townships of Wellesley, Wilmot, and North Dumfries was created in 1973 by a summer student named Peter Findlay, with the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation. He was hired by Archaeologist William Fox, who was assessing archaeological potential through vegetation coverage. Anecdotal accounts of interactions with first nations peoples exist within the survey log books.
Imagery and Historical Vegetation Swipe Map
Zoom in and swipe to see if these historical forests still exist today!
The letters recorded on the historical map represent the locations of different tree species.
For example, Ba stands for Basswood and E for Elm.
Tree Stati-sticks
Historically, broadleaf vegetation was the dominating vegetation type in the Region of Waterloo and this still holds true today. Hover over the graphs on the right to discover the numbers behind the vegetation maps. There was a greater representation of coniferous species in 1843 than mixedwoods which has since shifted to a greater mixedwood coverage.
Certain species make up a majority of the region's forests. Have a look at the bars to see which ones are more common.
Today, many forests have been cleared for development, agriculture, and other purposes. Broadleaf, Coniferous and Mixedwood areas seem small compared to other more dominant land uses allocated for cereals and grains, pastures and forages, and urban development. Other natural areas and cropland make up the rest of the area.
Top 5 Tree Species in Historical Waterloo 1843
1
Basswood
2
Elm
3
Ironwood
4
Pine
5
Hemlock
Click on the numbers at the top left corner to compare the densities of the five most abundant tree species. They are listed in order from greatest to least.
Field Surveying
Historically and even today, conducting field surveys demand intensive labour of knowledgeable, trained personnel at high costs.
This method is more limited to small sample plots because accuracy diminishes in large forests where stand conditions, species, and stem densities vary. It is also impossible to conduct surveys in challenging terrains such as mountainous regions.
Present Day Forestry Management
With the rapid advancements of technology, there are now much more economical and efficient ways to approach the challenge of tree surveys and forestry management.
Aerial photos have been used since the mid 1900s. Nowadays, remote sensing techniques have the advantages of reducing the amount of field sampling required, with the ability to cover multiple large forest cover areas continuously, while providing detailed forest information with high spatial resolution imagery.
From the high-resolution data collected by satellites or multi-spectral cameras and sensors mounted onto Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), analyses such as tree counting, tree-crown delineation, species identification, crown density estimation and forest stand polygon delineation can be conducted.
Additional applications of precision forestry include:
- Inventory assessment
- Logging surveillance
- Damage evaluation
- Forest fire hotspot detection
- Forest health monitoring
- Tree height detection
This work is the result of unpublished Masters (MES) research by Karrow, Thomas (2013), a published article by Thomas Karrow and Roger Suffling (2015) along with expertise from the staff at the University of Waterloo, Geospatial Centre.
References
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Regional Municipality of Waterloo Vegetation Survey with Urban areas, Road Jurisdictions and Boundaries
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Historical Vegetation Survey NotesW. Walker and Ontario Archives
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Historical Vegetation and Soil Maps for Southern Ontario
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Story Map, Kernel Density Vegetation Maps and Vegetation Composition GraphsCarmen Kong
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Forest Inventory with Photogrammetric Point Cloud Video
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Monitoring trends in tree crown condition using remote sensing data
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How drones are branching out with forestry
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Improving the Precision of Tree Counting by Combining Tree Detection with Crown Delineation and Classification on Homogeneity Guided Smoothed High Resolution (50 cm) Multispectral Airborne Digital DataMasato Katoh and François A. Gougeon
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Trees, insects and diseases of Canada's forests
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