Ecological Legacies of Pre-Columbian Settlements Evident in Palm Clusters of Neotropical Mountain Forests

ArXi:2507.06949v3 Announce Type: replace Ancient populations inhabited and transformed neotropical forests, yet the spatial extent of their ecological influence remains underexplored at high resolution. Here we present a deep learning and remote sensing based approach to estimate areas of pre-Columbian forest modification based on modern vegetation. We apply this method to high-resolution satellite imagery from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, as a nstration of a scalable approach, to evaluate palm tree distributions in relation to archaeological infrastructure.