After Americans Nearly Wiped Out Southern Longleaf Pine, Restoration Efforts Slowly Begin To Move

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.

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He was capturing longleaf’s uniqueness—not just the starburst clusters of needles as long as 18 inches—but what grows in the wide spaces between the trees. Mixed grasses, wildflowers and unusual plants (like the carnivorous Venus flytrap and white-topped pitcher plant) made the longleaf forest a biodiversity hot spot. Its unique inhabitants included the red-cockaded woodpecker, with its uncanny ability to select old pines with decaying heartwood for nesting; the eastern indigo snake, at more than 9 feet, North America’s longest native snake; and the gopher tortoise, which excavates extensive tunnels used as refuge by more than 300 species. The woodpecker and snake, along with about 30 other species, are federally listed as endangered, while the tortoise and many more are considered threatened by the demise of the longleaf pine.

Even as Bartram was writing his longleaf ode, North Carolina was becoming the “Tarheel” State by cutting longleaf and tapping its resin for the tar, pitch and turpentine used for waterproofing wooden ships. Railroad construction, accelerating after the Civil War, put the Deep South longleaf forest within reach—not only for naval stores but for lumber. Sturdy, straight-grained longleaf wood became so globally prized that Prince Albert and Queen Victoria used it in Scotland’s Balmoral Castle. A rush on the Southern forest ensued, and by the end of the 1800s, America’s biggest lumber export was southern yellow pine—primarily, longleaf—with 150 million board feet shipped out of Mobile annually, a nearly seven-fold increase in less than two decades, wrote historian Lawrence Early in his 2004 book, “Looking for Longleaf.” In 1897, the botanist Charles Mohr warned: “The exhaustion of the resources of these forests within the near future is inevitable.”

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17122023/axed-longleaf-pine-restoration-nature-based-solutions-challenges/