Earlier this fall, WNPR reported on charcoal mounds, hidden relics of the state's industrial past from back when iron was king and trees burned into charcoal to fuel furnaces. Now, scientists are using modern mapping technology to learn more about charcoal's legacy in Connecticut.
When I went looking for century-plus-old charcoal mounds earlier this year -- they weren't necessarily easy to find. The man-made circles, about 30 feet in diameter, can be buried under trees and duff, making them hard to spot with your eyes.
Because of that, William Ouimet, a professor in the Department of Geography at UConn, is using something called lidar. It's basically a laser slapped onto the belly of an airplane, which scans the ground and gives you a really precise image of the surface. You see old glacial geology, "but you also see all the amazing ways in which humans have modified and impacted the land's surface," Ouimet said.
"When you look at the lidar, you immediately see roads, you see houses, you see old quarries, bridges," he said. And, relics of old charcoal mounds -- revealed by the lidar as discrete rings or platforms dotting land now obscured to our eyes by regrown forest.
"I would say that in Litchfield County alone, we've found about 18,000 of them. As we branch out further to the east and to the south -- we're also seeing a significant amount," Ouimet said. "We're up to about 26,000 mapped and located in the state."
Scans are also extending into parts of New York, where the historic Salisbury Iron District created a great demand for locally-cultivated charcoal.
And considering one to two acres of forest needed to be cleared just make one charcoal mound, Ouimet said that's a lot of land use.
"The story that we often tell about New England is that, yes, the forests were cleared. And it was dominantly cleared for pasture and agriculture related to dairy farming," Ouimet said. "So, it's almost like a rediscovery of a way in which we were using the land and really understanding just how widespread and how significant it was."
As lidar imaging broadens our view of history, Ouimet said these findings will also bolster our understanding of the environment. Giving scientists clues to modern-day patterns of land use and soil impacts.
