View article

The vegetation of the northwest Wisconsin sand plain is dominated by oak and pine communities maintained by periodic forest fires. Regional climate records suggest extreme, spatially extensive droughts in the western Great Lakes Region before~ 3300, 1900-1600, and 1100 to 600 cal yr BP. The response of vegetation and fire regimes to these events is poorly understood and has management implications for responses to future climate change. We used pollen and charcoal in cores from three small, deep lakes located< 20 km from one another to test the hypothesis that forests on different textures of sandy soil would respond differently to climatic changes. Hell Hole (HH) and Lily (LY) lakes are in areas with soils of relatively fine sand; soils around Lone Star (LS) are coarser sand. We measured the degree of change of vegetation with ordinations and squared chord distance (SCD) between each fossil sample and the sample that corresponds to pre-European settlement vegetation and the rate of change using SCD between 50 yr increments. Charcoal accumulation rates (CHAR) and peak frequencies were analyzed using Charster.