US Forest Service Uses Old Land Deeds to See Forests of Long Ago
![Trees on historic survey maps were used to determine property lines (photo credit: Melissa Thomas-Van Gundy, U.S. Forest Service)](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20121019103605im_/http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8036/8027276902_f8aea45f30.jpg)
Trees on historic survey maps were used to determine property lines (photo credit: Melissa Thomas-Van Gundy, U.S. Forest Service)
Forest restoration would be a lot easier if people who lived a couple of centuries ago could just tell us about the forest as they knew it.
For Melissa Thomas-Van Gundy, a U.S. Forest Service scientist, using original land deeds from colonial America is as close as you can get to actually being there. Based in Parsons, W.Va., Thomas-Van Gundy is using a unique digitized dataset built with original land deeds to determine what a West Virginia forest looked like before European settlement. Read more »