We provide a Level 0 record of trees in Indiana transcribed from Public Land Surveys conducted by surveyors from the General Land Office of the United States in the 1800s. Posts were set every half mile in townships that were typically 6 miles by 6 miles square. Surveyors recorded details about the one to four trees closest (but typically recorded information for the two closest trees) to the posts and included information about the tree name (taxonomic specificity ranged by surveyor), tree diameter (inches), and distance and bearing from the post. Our records include the tree information and the location of the posts from which the tree information came from. For the msb-paleon.27.0 package, these Level 0 tree data were aggregated to the 8km grid resolution Level 1 product (see msb-paleon.26 package). That product was then statistically smoothed using a statistical model that accounts for zero-inflated continuous data with smoothing based on generalized additive modeling techniques and approximate Bayesian uncertainty estimates for the Level 2 products estimating aboveground biomass (msb-paleon.23), density (msb-paleon.24), and basal area (msb-paleon.25). The data processing steps and associated code are available in the GitHub repository: https://github.com/PalEON-Project/PLS_products.
These products are used in the manucript, Paciorek et al., 2021, The forests of the midwestern United States at Euro-American settlement: spatial and physical structure based on contemporaneous survey data. PLoS ONE 16(2):e0246473 (https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246473). This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grants #DEB-2213579 and 1241874.