V EGETATION The vegetation at Oak Spring has formed as a result of three nested scales of ecological change. First, tens of millions of years of evolutionary history has given us the temperate deciduous forest of eastern North America (see background context). Second, thousands of years of American Indian land use has shaped the northern Virginia Piedmont into the oakhickory forest, woodland, and savanna of presettlement times. Finally, a couple centuries of European land use and a few decades of Mellon era management put the most recent level of ecological change with extensive clearing, faunal extinctions, and species introductions into what we find today. This section outlines Oak Spring’s natural communities, vegetation, and trees.
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