Crowning Glory
Compass Magazine | Summer 2005
By Kelli Whitlock Burton
William Boyer crawled out of the white Chevy Blazer and stretched his 6-foot-plus long frame, working out the kinks from the 3-hour drive from Auburn to the small town of Flomaton, AL. Donning a baseball cap, he quickly drenched his shoes and trouser cuffs with insect repellent. A veteran of the southern Alabama woods, Boyer knew the bugs would be biting among the pine trees on this humid June afternoon.
At his feet lay a Natural Heritage Site marker blown over by Hurricane Ivan, a category 2 storm that, on September 16, 2004, made landfall about 100 miles southwest from where Boyer now stood. His gaze lifted to the woods in front of him, his eyes settling on the familiar rough-edged bark of the long-needled giants that swayed gently beneath a gray sky. When the hurricane roared onto land 9 months before, the east side of the forest at Flomaton bore the brunt of its 120-mileper-hour sustained winds, which some have estimated knocked down over half the forest. With trees dating back 200 and 300 years, the 60-acre Flomaton Natural Area is one of the last remaining stands of old-growth longleaf pine, the dominant species in an ecosystem that once covered more than 90 million acres from Texas to Virginia.
Boyer stepped lightly around the grasses and flowering plants that covered the ground, his eyes trained on the forest floor. Alongside him, colleagues Dale Brockway and Kris Connor kept a keen watch below as well, searching, like Boyer, for something in particular. They didn’t have to look long. As Boyer brushed back the vegetation, he discovered a pile of long, bright green needles surrounding a small tan bud. A longleaf pine seedling. He spotted several others in the same area, and began to smile. “This is good to see,” Boyer said. “Very good.”
With time, good weather, and room to grow, these short, grassy-looking plants will one day tower high above the forest floor. “Imagine what this place looked like hundreds of years ago, when Flomaton, and much of the Southeast, was covered with longleaf pine,” suggested Boyer’s colleague Brockway, gazing at the trees that are left, their perfectly linear trunks stretching as high as 100 feet, topped with branches that end in elegant needles extending up to 15 inches in length. As the small group of researchers stood silently, the wind blowing through the trees’ crowns filled the forest with earthy music that was peaceful and somber. “Longleaf as far as the eye could see,” Brockway said. “Wouldn’t that have been a sight?”
Boyer looked down, as if to observe a moment of silence for the passing of a friend. Once the keystone species–that upon which all the others depend–in the largest single-tree-dominated ecosystem in the United States, longleaf pine now occupies just under 3 million acres, less than 5 percent of its original territory. Boyer and Brockway, researchers with the Southern Research Station (SRS) unit in Auburn, AL and Connor, the unit’s project leader, are among a growing number of longleaf enthusiasts working to keep those numbers from dwindling even further by collaborating in efforts to protect the trees that remain and to restore longleaf to some of its native range.
It’s an arduous process. The timber industry long ago turned its sights to other pine species that mature more quickly, such as loblolly and slash. Development has left much of longleaf’s native soils buried under concrete; the absence of prescribed burning, critical to the longleaf’s success, has allowed hardwoods and other competitors to take over the forests. Funding for longleaf research is limited and many of the Nation’s leading longleaf scientists, like Boyer, have retired or are retiring. The species’ reputation as hard to grow hasn’t helped matters.
Boyer and his colleagues say much of that is just plain myth. They’re convinced that if more people knew the story of longleaf and understood how to grow it, the tree would experience a revival that would save it from dwindling further, as well as the hundreds of plants and animals that depend on the longleaf ecosystem for survival.
The Story of a Forest Brought Low
Before the last ice age, longleaf pine trees are believed to have started out in Mexico and Texas. But about 8,000 years ago, the ancient pines began to migrate north and east, ultimately taking up residence across the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains. Longleaf thrived for centuries, due in part, researchers suspect, to fire started by lightning or set by Native Americans. Intolerant of competition for space, sun, and nutrients,longleaf forests are healthiest when fire removes midstory woody trees and other species of pine, giving longleaf pine trees unfettered access to the sun and room to grow.
For many years, European settlers adopted the Native American practice of routinely clearing the forest floor with fire. Longleaf was prized for its quality timber, however, and any desire to preserve these majestic forests gave way to the economic windfall brought by their harvest. By the early 1900s, most of the country’s longleaf pines could be found not in forests, but in the “heart pine” floors of mansions and cottages, in the masts of ships, in docks and wharfs, and in the frames of buildings in many of the Nation’s large cities. Even the Brooklyn Bridge boasts a longleaf tie.
As forests fell to saws and axes, industry and private landowners tried to replace the trees with a new generation of longleaf. But many of the seeds would not generate, and those that did yielded seedlings that grew at a painfully slow pace. Longleaf’s dependence on fire and intolerance to competition had not yet been fully studied, so many just thought the tree incapable of quick and healthy growth. Loblolly and slash pine, on the other hand, sprouted and grew quickly, ready for harvest after just 10 years. Lands traditionally occupied by longleaf were replanted with these more economically desirable pines, and longleaf took another step toward extinction. Today, the National Biological Survey lists the longleaf ecosystem, whose pines once covered two-thirds of the Southeast, as the second mostendangered ecosystem in the United States. (Wetlands rank first.)
When SRS was first established as the Southern Forest Experiment Station in the 1920s, one of its first research priorities was to study longleaf pine ecosystems. Boyer, a native of Ohio educated in Syracuse, joined the USDA Forest Service in 1955. Until then, he had never laid eyes on a longleaf pine. Before long, he found himself a champion of the endangered tree, enamored of its fortitude and resilience, and of the iridescent shimmer of its graceful needles. Boyer began his studies at the Escambia Experimental Forest, a 3,000-acre tract near Brewton, AL, owned by T.R. Miller Mill Company. The company, interested in the higher prices longleaf timber commanded, leased the property to the Forest Service in 1947 as a laboratory with the hope that Forest Service scientists could find ways to ensure longleaf’s restoration.
Over the next nearly 20 years, Boyer and his colleagues learned much about ways to improve longleaf’s chances of survival. Despite those advances, the challenges of growing longleaf persisted and industry all but abandoned the storied pine in favor of loblolly and slash. Then, in the mid-1970s, research related to longleaf pine was deemphasized and the need for the 3,000-acre Escambia Experimental Forest was questioned. This was bad news for Boyer. If the Agency ended its 99-year lease with T.R. Miller, hundreds of longleaf pine trees studied so carefully for nearly three decades would surely be cut down and sold.
Boyer and fellow SRS scientist Robert Farrar quickly drafted a position paper to support the continuance of the experimental forest. Instead of emphasizing the merits of longleaf research, the pair’s strategy was to argue that the long-term studies of prescribed burning in the experimental forest were too valuable to abandon. Although controlled burning had become less popular with land managers in the South, new research–some of it from the Escambia Experimental Forest–suggested that regular, supervised burns were necessary for good forest management. Their arguments were successful and the lease with T.R. Miller continued. And so did Boyer’s research on longleaf.
“We just continued to do the longleaf research on the side,” Boyer says, “under the radar.”
About 400 miles west, James Barnett was slipping under that same radar. Barnett, now project leader of the SRS unit in Pineville, LA, had also spent years working on longleaf pine, focusing most of his research on improving the quality of longleaf seeds harvested and stored for planting. Barnett and his colleagues in Pineville diversified their pine studies at the Palustris Experimental Forest, part of the Kisatchie National Forest about 20 miles southwest of Alexandria, LA. Although they conducted a wide range of studies on loblolly and slash, they also continuedtheir work with longleaf restoration.
“Almost everything you do with longleaf is different than other pine species, more interesting and more challenging,” Barnett says. That challenge was one reason for Barnett’s persistence. Another was a sincere belief that longleaf could survive and thrive. “Everything about longleaf is difficult,” Barnett says.
Including, as it turns out, walking away from it.
Restoring from the Ground Up
Before the Forest Service turned its attention to other research areas in the mid-1970s, Barnett was working on seed production, an area that for decades had proven a stalwart obstacle to successful longleaf planting. Landowners and industry workers had tried to use the same collection and storage techniques for longleaf used successfully for other pine species. But as Barnett noted, everything about longleaf is different, right down to their seeds. After 7 years of study, Barnett developed a method for collecting, storing, and planting longleaf pine seeds that greatly increased seed viability. First, he discovered that unlike other pine seeds, which can be collected in early fall, longleaf seeds do best when gathered after the whole seed crop has matured–usually late October or early November.
One problem with seed viability had been finding the lowest temperature they could tolerate during storage. Too warm and the seeds would rot. Too cold and they would crack. Barnett discovered that by lowering the seeds’ moisture content to below 10 percent and freezing them at temperatures ranging from 0 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit, longleaf seeds could be stored for as long as 20 years and remain capable of producing healthy seedlings.
By the time Barnett solved the seed problem in 1975, many professional foresters had turned their attention away from longleaf. Interest likely would have continued to wane were it not for the red-cockaded woodpecker, which makes its home in longleaf pine forests. In the 1980s, when scientists realized that the number of red-cockaded woodpeckers had dwindled to the point of near extinction, the Federal Government began to require the restoration of the bird’s habitat on public lands where it had previously nested, and to provide incentives for restoration on private lands. This renewed interest in longleaf ecosystems was a welcome turn of events for Boyer, Barnett, and their colleagues.
Suddenly, a new market for Barnett’s work with seed production emerged. Soon after, Barnett turned his attention to another issue with longleaf restoration. Many landowners who planted longleaf from seed were finding that the seedlings did not have good survival rates. With other plants, survival is often improved if the seeds are planted first in a container, carefully tended for one or two growing seasons, and then transplanted into the ground. At the time, it was widely believed that longleaf could not be grown in containers. People also once thought that longleaf seed couldn’t be stored, Barnett thought. Perhaps they were underestimating longleaf once again.
Barnett spent years perfecting his container-growing method, using receptacles of varying sizes made with a number of different materials. He found that plastic containers about 1 1⁄2 inches in diameter and 6 inches deep seem to be the most efficient, both in cost and production. Longleaf planted from seed have a 50- to 70-percent chance of survival; Barnett’s container-grown longleaf seedlings have a 90- to 95- percent survival rate. Although the plastic containers he uses are the cheapest of all the types he studied, it’s still twice as expensive as growing longleaf from seed. But spending the extra money up front, Barnett says, pays off with healthier trees down the road.
A Long-Term Relationship with Fire
The suppression of naturally caused fire over most of the last century seriously unbalanced forest ecosystems across the United States. Without fire, understory and midstory growth in all types of forests went unchecked. This was especially damaging to longleaf pine. Habitats once dominated by longleaf and characterized by open spaces filled with low-growing wiregrass or bluestem grasses had become thick with shrubs and woody tree species, a tangled disorder that looked more like a teenager’s messy bedroom than a classic longleaf savanna.
Boyer had examined the use of fire in longleaf management through several long-term studies at the Escambia Experimental Forest. Even though he officially retired from the Forest Service in 1998, Boyer has continued to follow the studies he began in the 1960s. Longleaf, he found, is surprisingly resistant to low-intensity fire; longleaf seeds actually require fire to germinate. While it’s true that blazes that burn too hot can scorch some trees and kill some grass-stage seedlings, others survive, and once they stand higher than 4 to 6 feet, they’re generally safe from fire.
“Burning doesn’t make longleaf grow better. It allows the longleaf pine habitat to exist,” says James Haywood, a research forester at the Pineville unit who has studied fire in different pine ecosystems for two decades. “Yes, you do kill some regeneration with fire, but you don t kill all of it. You’re sacrificing tree growth in some for the overall betterment of the habitat.”
Other fire studies have looked at how fire can be combined with herbicide and the mechanical removal of woody species. Boyer’s studies suggest that a combination of the three methods works best to get an unkempt forest under control. Then, regular prescribed burns can be used to maintain the classic longleaf habitat. That begs the question, though, of just how often to burn. Kenneth Outcalt, a research plant ecologist with the SRS unit in Athens, GA, says that prescribed burns every 2 years offer the best results.
“There’s a big dividing line between 2 and 3 years and we’ve found that waiting for 3 years gives the woody species too much time to recover,” he says. “If you really want to change the composition, you need fire at least every 2 years, which allows you to reduce the amount of woody species and increase the herbaceous grasses and plants. It’s more in tune with what the natural system looked like.”
Forming an Alliance
Through the years, SRS scientists have directed their attention toward raising public awareness about the benefits of longleaf and offering information to disprove myths about longleaf growth. Key to these efforts has been the Longleaf Alliance, an advocacy organization that SRS helped to found in 1994. Made up of 600 to 800 people in 20 States, the alliance is a collaboration among environmentalists, timber industry representatives, government forest ecologists, and university scientists who are committed to longleaf restoration. The alliance hosts workshops, information booths, and other awareness campaigns to provide information about growing longleaf.
“There’s a lot of passion behind this,” says Dean Gjerstad, codirector of the alliance. “We just really believe in longleaf.”
Some 170,000 acres of longleaf were planted in the 1990s, Gjerstad says, due in large part to the alliance’s education efforts. One of their challenges has been to overcome the fear that because longleaf takes longer to mature than other pine species, planting longleaf just isn’t economically feasible. Loblolly and slash pine can be harvested after just 10 to 12 years. Longleaf isn’t ready for timber production for at least 20 years, usually longer. But there’s more to longleaf than timber, Gjerstad is quick to point out. There’s a growing market for pine straw, a prime component in mulch products, and longleaf pine–with its glorious long needles–offers a bumper crop of pine straw in just 10 years after planting. The payoff can be as much as $50 an acre per year. And once longleaf is ready to be sold, it usually commands a much higher price than loblolly or slash because of its quality, height, and ramrod straightness. Longleaf is often used for utility poles, which garners a good profit for the timber industry.
The Forest Service is also looking for new ways to incorporate longleaf restoration into rural development. One idea has been to partner with tribal nations to produce and sell container-grown longleaf seedlings, a project under development with the Poarch Band of Creek Indians Reservation near Atmore, AL. The program would be similar to a successful effort out West called the Intertribal Nursery Council, which involves 68 tribes and 7 tribal colleges in growing and selling a variety of native trees and plants.
But development is only part of the campaign. There also is a need to counter misinformation about longleaf growth and sustainability. Although the Longleaf Alliance, SRS and other agencies, and individual scientists have done much to educate landowners and industry about these ancient trees, there remains a skepticism that Boyer says is unfounded.
“It’s clear from our studies that longleaf pine grows faster and is a more prolific seeder than once thought,” Boyer says. “Longleaf has been here for thousands of years, so clearly, regeneration does work.”
The end goal of all this work is not to return longleaf to its post ice age dominance in the Southeast, Outcalt says. But great strides can be made in restoring the ecosystem, and these efforts have already shown some success. Since 1996, the Longleaf Alliance estimates that 600 million longleaf seedlings have been planted on about 1 million acres.
“Longleaf pine is never going to return to the number of acres that it once occupied. That’s not really necessary or realistic,” he says. “We’re trying to restore health, which is not the same thing. We can’t go back in time. The idea is to have the general structure and composition of what historical stands look like.”
With time and persistence, SRS researchers believe they can get more and more people to buy into this idea. Longleaf is an easy story to sell, they say, once you remove the myth from the picture. And as Boyer is quick to note, restoring longleaf is about more than just saving a tree that has stood its ground on American soil for centuries. It’s about preserving an entire ecosystem and the hundreds of plants and animals that depend on that habitat for survival.
“These trees have been here for thousands of years,” Boyer notes, paying tribute to the perseverance of a species he has spent a career studying and almost an entire lifetime championing. “To lose them now . . . well, we just can’t let that happen.”