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The longleaf pine ( Mill.) ecosystem once occupied an estimated 37 million hectares in the southeastern United States (Frost this volume). These forests dominated the Coastal Plain areas ranging from Virginia to Texas through central Florida, occupying a variety of sites ranging from xeric sandhills to wet poorly drained flatwoods to the montane areas in northern Alabama. The extent of the longleaf pine ecosystem has greatly declined since European settlement. At present, it occupies less than 1 million hectares, making it one of the most threatened ecosystems in the United States.Will this ecosystem always be in peril? Maybe not! The objective of this chapter is to provide an overview of the book’s content that will examine the historical, ecological, silvicultural, and restoration aspects of longleaf pine ecosystems.

From Virginia to Texas, much of the coastal plain landscape was once covered by a “vast forest of the most stately pine trees that can be imagined … ”(Bartram 1791 [1955]). Longleaf pine could be found from sea level, on the margins of brackish marshes, to around 2000 feet on the Talladega National Forest in Alabama (Harper 1905; Stowe et al. 2002). The spectacular failure of the primeval longleaf pine forest (Fig. 1) to reproduce itself after exploitation is a milestone event in the natural history of the eastern United States, even greater in scale and impact than the elimination of chestnut () from Appalachian forests by blight. This chapter discusses presettlement extent and summarizes major events in the decline of the longleaf pine ecosystem and its displacement from more than 97% of the lands it once occupied.

When Europeans first settled in southeastern North America and began to explore their new homeland, they found a landscape that was to a large extent dominated by open, savannalike longleaf pine woodlands. The pines were typically widely spaced, affording the traveler opportunities to see for long distances without obstruction by undergrowth. The ground layer was dominated by grasses with a great diversity of showy forbs. Vegetation of this character occurred from southeastern Virginia southward deep into peninsular Florida and west to western Louisiana and eastern Texas (Frost et al. 1986; Harcombe et al. 1993; Peet and Allard 1993; Ware et al. 1993; Platt 1999; Christensen 2000; Frost this volume).

Regenerating longleaf pine () is key to its long-term sustainable production of forest resources and its perpetuation as the dominant tree species in a variety of important ecosystems ranging from xeric to mesic to hydric site conditions.

Many of the stand structural characteristics of longleaf pine ( Mill.) forests that existed prior to European colonization have been altered or lost from past disturbance histories (Frost this volume).

In the southeastern U.S. Coastal Plain, all landscapes can be conceptually divided into aquatic, wetland, and upland habitats. Aquatic and wetland habitats account for a substantial percentage of the Coastal Plain, especially near the coast and in Louisiana and Florida, but overall from southeastern Virginia to east Texas, uplands constitute the largest proportion of the terrain. It has been estimated that, upon the arrival of Europeans and Africans in North America, upland ecosystems dominated by a single tree species, longleaf pine (), accounted for about 60% of the Coastal Plain landscape (Ware et al. 1993). In other words, longleaf pine ecosystems were the principal ecosystems in a belt of land stretching about 2000 miles along the southeastern margin of the North American continent. Most of the range of longleaf pine was in the Coastal Plain, a gently undulating, lowelevation (0–200 m), sedimentary landform with soils developed from sandy clays (clayhills and some flatwoods) or pure sand (sandhills and flatwoods), sometimes underlain by limestone (Brown et al. 1990; Martin and Boyce 1993). Longleaf pine ecosystems and their vertebrate faunas are the focus of this chapter.

The use of uneven-aged silviculture has increased markedly in the past 20 years. This is especially true in the southern United States, where the use of clearcutting and planting is often viewed as a practice whose emphasis on fiber production results in unacceptable consequences for other values, such as those that benefit from maintenance of continuous forest cover over time. Public lands in general, and national forest lands in particular, have become the focal point for the replacement of clearcutting and planting with even-aged and uneven-aged reproduction cutting methods that rely on natural regeneration, and that can better achieve management goals that are defined by residual stand structure and condition rather than by harvested volume.

Across the historical range of longleaf pine ( Mill.), less than 10% of lands previously occupied by longleaf ecosystems are currently in public ownership (Johnson and Gjerstad 1999; Alavalapati et al., this volume). The remainder is owned by private entities ranging from the forest industry, to timberland investment organizations, to highly varied nonindustrial private landowners. Any significant recovery of longleaf is therefore dependent on the participation of the private sector. Certainly, for the forest industry, and many other investor-type groups, the need for competitive returns from forest management is extremely important. And although experience has indicated that economic return is often not the primary motivator for nonindustrial landowners, it usually plays some role in management decision-making.

Restoring longleaf pine trees to the southeastern landscape is a daunting task, because more than 97% of the original area has been lost to other uses (Landers et al. 1995; Frost this volume). However, many of the disincentives and difficulties in managing for longleaf pine have been addressed and solved or exposed as misconceptions, and landowners across the region are expressing renewed interest in returning this once-dominant southern pine to their lands. Several recent publications providing information to landowners and natural resource managers on longleaf pine restoration and management have appeared (Earley 1997, 2002; Franklin 1997; Kush 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003; Johnson 1999; Mitchell et al. 2000).

The longleaf pine ecosystem includes some of the most species-rich plant communities outside of the tropics, and most of that diversity resides in the ground layer vegetation. In addition to harboring many locally endemic and otherwise rare plant species (Peet this volume) and enhancing habitat for the resident fauna (Costa and DeLotelle this volume), the ground layer vegetation produces fine fuel needed to carry low-intensity surface fires that perpetuate the ecosystem. Ecosystem restoration requires the restoration of both the ground layer plant community and the pine canopy.