ecological modelling 211 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 301–308 available at www.sciencedirect.com journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolmodel Using a spatially explicit ecological model to test scenarios of fire use by Native Americans: An example from the Harlem Plains, New York, NY William T. Bean a,* , Eric W. Sanderson b a University of California, Berkeley, Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, 137 Mulford Hall #3114, Berkeley, CA 94720, United States b Wildlife Conservation Society, 2300 Southern Boulevard, Bronx, NY, 10460, USA article info Article history: Received 11 May 2006 Received in revised form 2 September 2007 Accepted 21 September 2007 Published on line 5 November 2007 Keywords: Lenni Lenape FARSITE Fire Pre-colonial vegetation Northeastern United States Human disturbance Grasslands Historical ecology Succession Post-fire mortality abstract It is unclear to what extent Native Americans in the pre-European forests of northeast North America used fire to manipulate their landscape. Conflicting historical and archaeological evidence has led authors to differing conclusions regarding the importance of fire. Ecological models provide a way to test different scenarios of historical landscape change. We applied FARSITE, a spatially explicit fire model, and linked tree mortality and successional models, to predict the landscape structure of the Harlem Plains in pre-European times under different scenarios of Native American fire use. We found that annual burning sufficed to convert the landscape to a fire-maintained grassland ecosystem, burning less often would have produced a mosaic of forest and grasslands, and even less frequent burning (on the order of once every 20 years) would not have had significant landscape level effects. These results suggest that if the Harlem Plains had been grasslands in the 16th century, they must have been intentionally created through Native American use of fire. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The use of fire by Native Americans in northeast North Amer- ica has been the subject of much debate shared among a broad group of ecologists, archaeologists and environmen- tal historians. Some like Day (1953), Cronon (1983) and Krech (1999) believe that Native Americans used fire often to manip- ulate their landscape, and that these manipulations may ∗ Corresponding author: Tel.: +1 402 305 4700. E-mail address: tbean@nature.berkeley.edu (W.T. Bean). have taken place over broad extents in the pre-European forests. Skeptics admit that the rate of forest fires around a village might have been elevated over a background rate because Northeast Indians were using fire for cooking and pottery. However, they find little evidence that fires were widespread or intentionally set (Russell, 1983). Early settlers rarely offer first-hand accounts of fires and fewer still tell of intentional 0304-3800/$ – see front matter © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2007.09.014