Sooner or later, most landowners I walk with ask the same question: what was here before? Before the farm, before the first cutting, before the drain tile. The Michigan Historical Vegetation Atlas is my way of answering that question, and it is built so you can look it up yourself before we ever meet on the ground.
The atlas is free. It runs in a web browser on a computer, tablet or phone, with nothing to install and no account to create. This guide walks through every feature in the order you are likely to use them, with a screenshot of each.
What the atlas is
The atlas is an interactive map of Michigan's vegetation around 1800, before large-scale logging, farming and wetland drainage remade the state. Its source is a 1995 reconstruction by Patrick Comer and colleagues at the Michigan Natural Features Inventory (MNFI). They worked from the field notes of the federal General Land Office surveys: between 1816 and 1856, deputy surveyors walked the section lines of Michigan's public-land survey and wrote down the trees, wetlands, prairies and openings they passed through.
Comer's team turned those notes into a statewide map of 75 vegetation types. The atlas puts that map on a modern, searchable base, together with the survey grid, the surveyors' witness trees, current satellite imagery and public land boundaries, so you can find your own property on it and read it in context.
If you want the story of the surveys themselves, I wrote about it in What Michigan Looked Like in 1800, and How We Know. This guide is about using the tool.
Find your land
Everything starts with the search bar at the top of the map. It accepts almost anything you might have on hand:
- A street address, with suggestions as you type.
- Coordinates, entered as latitude and longitude, such as 44.5234, -84.6151.
- A county or township name. When a township name repeats across counties, the atlas picks the one nearest your current view and names its county.
- A legal description from a deed or tax bill, such as T1N R3W Sec 14. The atlas reads the common deed styles, including T. 1 N., R. 3 W., Sec. 14 and Section 14, T1N, R3W. Quarter-section calls like NE1/4 SE1/4 are accepted, and the search takes you to the whole section.
- Your current location. On a phone in the field, the target button beside the search box flies to the spot where you are standing and opens a field packet for it.
The drop-down at the left end of the search bar limits a search to one kind of place when a name could mean more than one thing. After a search, a pin marks the spot; click the pin to copy its coordinates. If the map knows what grew under the pin, the details card opens by itself.
Read what grew there
The colored patches are the 75 vegetation types, and the map shows them at three levels of detail. At statewide zoom you see nine broad classes, such as upland hardwood or lowland conifer; clicking there only tells you to zoom in. From about county scale inward, every patch carries its full type, and the finest outlines appear as you zoom closer.
Hover over any patch to see its name. Click it to open the details card, which gives you:
- The vegetation type and its group: forests, wetlands and swamps, openlands and barrens, rock and bedrock, or lakes and rivers.
- The survey location of the spot you clicked, such as T2S R9W Sec 23, when the survey grid layer is on.
- What to check on the ground: the evidence that would confirm or complicate the historical label on your own property.
- Links to MNFI's descriptions of the matching modern natural communities, and for some types a reference photograph.
- A button to build a field packet, and another to copy a link to this exact map view.
Selecting a type also draws an amber outline around every other patch of the same type in view. It is the quickest way to see whether the oak opening on your land was an island or part of a larger system.
Browse all 75 types in the catalog
The Catalog button opens the full list of vegetation types, grouped by community. The filter box finds a type by its own name or by the name of a linked modern community, and a switch toggles between the types in your current view and all 75.
Click a type's name to show only that type on the map, and shift-click to add others to it. Hide removes a type instead. Small chips on the map remind you what is filtered, with one click to clear them. Filtering is often how I start a restoration conversation: show only the oak openings, oak barrens and savannas, and the open oak country of a county jumps off the screen.
See the witness trees
Switch on Witness trees in the Layers panel, under Reference, and zoom in. Each dot is a tree a surveyor recorded at a survey corner, sized by its diameter. Zoom closer and every dot is labeled with its species and diameter in inches, as the surveyor wrote them down. There are about 237,000 of them.
Click a tree for its card: the species, its diameter, the survey township and the vegetation type it stood in. For the common species, the card adds the Latin name, a reference photograph and a note about the tree, and where the record includes them, it shows the survey year, the surveyor's name or the county.
Witness trees are the raw evidence behind the map. When a patch is labeled oak opening and the corners around it are white oak, bur oak and chinkapin oak, the two records agree. When they disagree, that spot deserves a closer look on the ground.
Two cautions. Surveyors chose witness trees for practical reasons, favoring sound trees that were easy to mark, so the sample leans toward some species. And the transcribed record has gaps: a missing dot does not mean a species was absent. The dots are also placed approximately. Trees recorded at the same corner are offset slightly from one another, and the surveyors' bearings and distances are not shown.
Compare 1800 with today
Two tools set the historical map against the modern landscape. The first is Compare, which opens a swipe view: the 1800 map on one side of a divider and current satellite imagery on the other, with a slider to move the divider. Both halves move together as you pan and zoom, so you can line up a woodlot, a wetland or a field edge with what the surveyors described.
The second is the atlas mode, chosen at the top of the Layers panel. Paper Atlas, the default, shows the vegetation on a plain dark ground. Terrain Memory lays it over shaded relief so you can read the landform beneath the old cover. Satellite Overlay puts modern imagery underneath. A slider sets how strongly the 1800 layer shows, anywhere from hidden to opaque.
Imagery capture dates vary from place to place, so treat the satellite view as recent context and check it against what you see on the ground.
Add the survey grid, public land and roads
The Layers panel holds several modern reference layers, each with its own switch and, where useful, its own labels:
- Survey grid: the six-mile township and range squares and the one-mile sections, labeled so you can match the map to a legal description. Turn on Selectable and a click opens a card with the section, township, range, civil township and legal description.
- Public lands: state forests, state game and wildlife areas, state parks and recreation areas, national forests, national parks and lakeshores, national wildlife refuges and other federal land, with names at close zoom. Turn on Selectable and a click opens a card for that unit.
- Counties, cities, and major and local roads.
- Witness trees, described above.
The public land boundaries come from the Michigan DNR and the federal Protected Areas Database. Treat them as a planning reference and confirm them on the ground.
Sketch and measure
Measure opens the field sketch tool. Choose Area and click around a boundary to watch the acres add up, Rectangle or Circle for quick shapes, or Distance to trace a route. Add map center, Undo and Clear sketch make it workable on a phone or from the keyboard. When you finish, the sketch stays on the map while you keep exploring, and it is included in a field packet.
Sketches are approximate and meant for orientation. They do not establish a legal boundary, and the atlas does not total the vegetation types inside a sketch. Sketches stay in your browser tab and are left out of shared links.
Build a field packet
Once a vegetation type is selected, the Field packet button, or Build a field packet on the details card, assembles a printable record for a site walk. Capture the current map, then print the packet or save it as a PDF from your browser. You can also save the map image by itself, copy the source citation, or copy a link to the view. The packet includes:
- The captured map, with the date and time, the map extent and the view settings.
- A legend of every historical type in the captured view.
- Your field sketch and its measurement, if you drew one.
- The statewide share of the selected type, for scale.
- Questions to take into the field for that kind of community, plus a six-step checklist for recording what you find.
- A notes box for your own observations and questions, or blank lines if you would rather write on paper.
- The source citation and its limits.
Your notes and sketches stay in the page. They are not sent to me or anyone else, and they are not saved either, so print or save the packet before you close the tab.
See the whole state at once
Stats, in the Layers panel under Read & share, opens the atlas dashboard: the makeup of Michigan's mapped landscape around 1800. Forests covered about two thirds of it, wetlands and swamps about a quarter, and openlands and barrens about 6.5 percent. Below the group totals, every type is ranked by its share, and clicking a bar filters the map to that type. Beech, sugar maple, basswood and red oak forest leads the list at nearly 16 percent.
Share, beside Stats, copies a link to your current view, including the map position, atlas mode, layers and filters. Anyone who opens it sees the same map. Your notes and sketches are never part of the link.
How I use it with landowners
- Before a first visit, I look up the property and note its circa-1800 type or types, the witness trees nearby and the lay of the land.
- On the walk, we compare that history with what is growing now: canopy trees, seedlings, ground-layer plants, soils and drainage.
- Where the two differ, we talk about why. A closed maple woods on ground mapped as oak opening points to a change in disturbance, most often the loss of fire. A plowed field on mapped swamp points to drainage.
- Then we set a target the site can actually support today, which may or may not be the 1800 community.
The atlas is useful for restoration planning, habitat work, choosing native species for planting and seeding, and understanding why a woods looks the way it does. It is a starting point for each of those decisions, and the ground has the final word.
What the atlas cannot tell you
- Today's vegetation, condition, ownership or access.
- Property lines, a legal boundary or a survey.
- Wetland boundaries, or whether you may alter a wetland.
- An exact restoration target for a small parcel. The original mapping was drawn at about 1:24,000, and the smallest wetlands it includes are typically 15 to 20 acres.
- A single moment in time. The surveys span four decades, and some places were already changing when the surveyors arrived.
The atlas methods page covers the sources, the map scale, the known biases in the survey record and how to cite the atlas. It is worth a read before you lean on the map for a decision.
FAQ
- Is the Michigan Historical Vegetation Atlas free?
- Yes. It runs in any current web browser on a computer, tablet or phone, with no account or download.
- Where does the 1800 vegetation map come from?
- From Michigan's Presettlement Vegetation, as Interpreted from the General Land Office Surveys 1816-1856, by Comer and colleagues at the Michigan Natural Features Inventory (1995). The atlas presents that reconstruction on a searchable map with reference layers; the vegetation boundaries are theirs.
- Can I search by the legal description on my deed?
- Yes. Type the township, range and section, such as T1N R3W Sec 14, into the search bar. The atlas reads the common deed styles, assumes the Michigan Meridian and takes you to the section.
- Does the atlas work on a phone?
- Yes. On a phone the panels open as sheets from the bottom of the screen, and the location button can drop you on the spot where you are standing and open a field packet for it.
- Is anything I enter sent to Baird Forestry?
- No. Your notes and sketches stay in your browser tab. An address you type is sent to a public geocoding service to find it, and the imagery and terrain come from Esri. The site counts anonymous tool use without locations; the privacy page has the details.