For millennia, longleaf pine forests stretched 92 million acres across the U.S. Southeast. Today, less than 5 million acres remain. But a growing effort to recover this ecosystem is taking root.
Excerpt from this story from The Nature Conservancy:
Across the coastal plains of the southeastern United States, amid miles of industrial slash and loblolly pine farms, remnants of another pine forest—once North America’s largest—hide in plain sight. Unlike densely shaded deciduous forests, longleaf pine trees grow wide apart. This distance forms an open canopy that lets sunlight spill down through a mostly vacant midstory to reach a forest floor tightly packed with grasses and flowering plants. Though these forests can feel almost empty, the longleaf pine ecosystem is a trove of biodiversity. Some researchers estimate its species richness is surpassed only by tropical forests and coral reefs. But with less than 5% of longleaf pine forests remaining, states, the federal government and conservation groups, including The Nature Conservancy, are working to save these Southern forests—and the species that depend on them—before it’s too late.
A Public-Private Partnership Confronts the Challenges of Nature-Based Solutions, Including Urban Growth, Logging Pressures and a Warming Pla
Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:
On a fall walk through Tuskegee National Forest, ecologist John Kush kept his eyes on the ground, looking for sprouts of hope.
“It’s not too bad,” he said, cautiously. “The overstory is longleaf. But it’s the understory that tells the picture.”
A retired Auburn University research fellow, Kush has spent much of his life studying Pinus palustris—the longleaf pine. The state tree of Alabama, it once reigned throughout the southeastern United States, but was all but given up for dead not long ago. Beginning with European settlement, and accelerating after the Civil War, logging and resin extraction drove the sturdy, long-needled species to near-extinction. Less than 3 percent of its original 92 million acre range remained by the 1990s.
Kush worked early in his career at the Escambia National Experimental Forest, in Brewton, Alabama, near the Florida state line, which produced key research on bringing back the tree that anchored one of the most extensive and biodiverse forest ecosystems in North America.
Now, in what has been called one of the most ambitious landscape restoration projects in the world, Tuskegee National Forest is one of thousands of sites where forest managers have been trying to put such research into practice. As he walks the forest, Kush sees both promising signs—a cluster of baby longleaf pine seedlings—and troubling ones: patches of small hickory trees and hawthorn shrubs, woody growth that can crowd out the longleaf with shade and thick groundcover.
Longleaf restoration is a struggle against such competition. It requires careful monitoring, probably herbicides, possibly the harvesting of nearby trees, and certainly fire—blazes repeated as frequently as every two years and carefully timed for both the weather and the condition of the forest.
Advocates believe the effort is worth it—not just for the trees, but for society. They see restoration as an important nature-based solution for storing carbon and making the South more resilient to climate change, in tune with President Joe Biden’s view of forests’ role in achieving U.S. goals under the Paris climate accord. His aim: better management of domestic forests for climate resilience.
But the restoration effort also can generate carbon emissions, due to both burning and the cutting down of older trees to make way for young longleaf—clashing with Biden’s stated objective of protecting mature forests as carbon sinks. It will take time for new longleaf forests to pick up the slack as carbon storehouses, years during which pressure from development and competing trees is a constant threat. The timing of prescribed burns is also becoming more difficult due to hotter summers and unpredictable weather. Meanwhile, some of the logging for longleaf restoration provides feedstock for biomass energy, which even its biggest supporters in Europe have been rethinking due to concerns about its sustainability.
The coalition steering the project, America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative, or ALRI, includes three federal agencies, nine states, numerous nonprofit groups and an array of corporations, some more commonly associated with logging than restoration. Among them are International Paper, Weyerhaeuser, and the biggest companies in the wood pellet bioenergy industry, Enviva and Drax, which are entangled in controversies over the climate costs and benefits of their practices. A conservative estimate of the money spent on longleaf restoration by ALRI participants since 2010 is at least $700 million.
But the group recently acknowledged it is not on track to meet the target it set in 2009 to more than double the extent of longleaf forest from 3.4 million to 8 million acres by 2025. Instead, longleaf acreage has increased about 30 percent, to 5.2 million acres, and at the current growth rate, would reach 5.5 million acres by 2025. So when ALRI released a new conservation plan in November to guide its activities through 2040, the group recommitted to the 8 million acre target, but doubled the time it is allowing to meet the goal. ALRI hopes to accelerate the pace and improve the quality of restoration.
eldritch-augur said: I’d love to see a focus on longleaf as well! What part of the southeast are you in?
Yeah, longleafs are awesome! There’ll probably be quite a bit of overlapping of information in my posts, since the southern yellow pines have a lot of similarities. I’ll try to note when something applies to longleafs as well. If you felt like it, though, you could do the Plant Ally Project, too, with a focus on longleaf pines and we could share and compare info. ;)
