PalEON postdoc Simon Goring recently presented his work with historic vegetation data in the US Midwest at the International Biogeography Society 2013 meeting in Miami, Florida.  His talk, “Estimating pre-settlement vegetation in the American Midwest: Exploring climate relationships and links to proxy data for robust data assimilation,” builds on Simon’s work to generate spatial data layers providing settlement-era forest composition, density, and biomass estimates  derived from US Public Land Survey data from the 1800’s.  You can check out Simon’s thoughts on the IBS conference on his blog, Down with Time, or view slides from his presentation on figshare here.