Reddit reviews Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England

You read this one? Reading the Forested Landscape.

You might like "Reading the forested landscape".

My two favorites, for understanding the general ideas of ecology without memorizing the nitrogen cycle, are Reading the Forested Landscape and Tracking and the Art of Seeing. Those are the books that convinced me that I wanted to study ecology in graduate school.

FWIW, I also enjoy memorizing the nitrogen cycle.

https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Forested-Landscape-Natural-History/dp/0881504203

This book represents everything about what "reading the landscape" means to me. Though it's centered on New England the author's primary goal is how to achieve an understanding of the specific natural history of a specific place by observing and analyzing what we can see in it. Reading the landscape means interpreting what you see and understanding what has happened to it, how humans have lived in it, what are it's tendencies, what storms and fires have passed through, and on and on.

In Japan, ancient groups inscribed stones along the coast with warning that said more or less "do not build your house below this point." They were historical markers (perhaps someday to be rendered irrelevant) of tsunami-driven tide waters. In most of North America we have no record of multi-century, multi-generational knowledge and so interpreting and analyzing the natural landscape is the closest we can come to having an approximate understanding of what has taken place here and what will be borne out in the future.

Read this book
It explains how to figure out the history of a forest based on current subtle physical features. Might be neat to incorporate some of this CSI type of info into your book.

I like to practice reading the forest. Check the book out; it's fantastic. It's fun to try to "read" the woods and think about what formed the forests I'm exploring.

This book helps answer a lot of these kinds of questions