Presently, teak is the dominant species in Bangladesh's hill forests. Which was introduced from Myanmar in 1871 and first planted in the Chittagong hill forest, Bangladesh. Therefore, it is crucial to know which tree was most prevalent in the hill forest before teak plantation. It is debatable whether the Gamar (Gmelina arborea) or Garjan (Dipterocarpus turbinatus) was more prominent.
You should run some eDNA of a lot of different places, and see what originally grew there. You can read the article at https://www.science.org/content/article/lost-world-northern-greenland-conjured-dna-ancient-soil where an ecosystem that existed in Greenland two million years ago was recreated by doing eDNA soil testing.
Depends how far back you want to go. If it is only 200-300 years, then I would dig down at different layers, and float carbon from the soil and do the DNA testing on that, to determine the original forest trees. At the same time from each layer, I would radiocarbon date, so you could tie the eDNA results to a particular time frame.
I radiocarbon dated some desert grassland soils from Nevada last year, and got 300 year old carbon.
The other method you could use, is to dig soil from different levels and float off the carbon, which might be seeds that have been carbonized--or if less and 100 years old maybe still intact, and id those seeds from the lost forest from the past.
Since you already know that Gamar (Gmelina arborea) or Garjan (Dipterocarpus turbinatus) were two possibilities that were more prominent, then extract DNA from both of those candidates, and then compare your results from your soil eDNA studies.
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