A History of Population Change in New England, 1790 - 2000:
Having a major impact on land use/land cover change, there is a need to understand and reconstruct the distribution of the human population across the landscape. Reviewing the environmental and socio-economic factors which have influenced this distribution in a historical context may help us understand our current environment, predict likely scenarios for the future, and guide proactive decisions and policies to mitigate negative impacts. The focus of my efforts in this regard is to build a geospatial database of population change, at the municipal level, across the six New England states from the colonial period to the present using population counts from historical census data.
view an animation of population change since 1790
Updated
05/22/2008
envstudies@brown.edu