Aim Despite small and transient populations, early Māori transformed large areas of New Zealand's forest landscapes. We sought to isolate the biophysical predictors that explain forest loss in the pre‐historic (i.e. pre‐European) period in New Zealand. Location New Zealand. Methods We used resampled boosted regression trees to isolate the key predictors of forest loss from a suite of 19 topographic, climatic, soil‐related and...

At the time of M āori settlement, ca. 750 years ago, N ew Z ealand's ecosystems experienced catastrophic change, including the introduction of fire to ignition‐limited ecosystems and the resulting widespread loss of forest. While high‐resolution sediment‐charcoal analyses suggest this forest loss was rapid, M āori populations were small and transient during the Initial Burning Period and there is evidence for widespread fire a...