LONGLEAF PINE

Longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) forests of the southern United States are declining and are in need of special attention from the conservation community (Means and Grow 1985, Noss 1989, Kelly and Bechtold 1990). Pre-European settlement longleaf pine forest may have extended up to 60,000,000 acres (Boyer 1990, Simberloff 1993, Frost 1993); yet, current estimates of remaining longleaf pine forests are just about 3,000,000 acres (Dennington and Farrar 1983, Engstrom et al. 1996). Therefore, many efforts are underway to reestablish longleaf pine on upland site (Moser 1996, Landers et al. 1995, USDA 1993b). A question that arises is the balance between management of mature, single-aged forests and uneven-aged timber because the uneven-aged timber management produces a forest more similar to the pre-settlement forests (Engstrom et al. 1996). The original forest matrix is thought to contain longleaf pine stands that vary greatly in their structure (Schwartz 1907, Wahlenberg 1946). One of the reasons for these stands that have a variety of ages and diameter classes is numerous small-scale disturbances (such as lightening strikes and varying intensity of fires) (Platt et al. 1988, Engstrom et al. 1996). Before European settlement fires were thought to have occurred as frequently as every 1-10 years (Chapman 1932a,b, 1950a,b, Christensen 1981, 1988).

Thus, fire is a recognized way of managing longleaf forests (Landers et al. 1995). However, there are problems in the resulting interactions between microclimate and physiology and ecology of regeneration of these forests (Croker 1990, Boyer and White 1990). These problems derive from a variety of sources. The species produces seed only irregularly (Boyer and White 1990). Competition among the roots for water may be a factor reducing the presence of seedlings in mature forest stands (Chapman 1909, Brown 1958). Numerous studies show that mature pine stands have few juveniles and that there is a inverse relationship between juvenile growth and overstory density (Pessin 1938, 1939, Heyward 1939, Smith 1955, Boyer 1963, 1974). Furthermore, the heavily weighted longleaf pine seeds do not fall very far from the parent tree (Croker and Boyer 1975). Recently, it has been shown that shelter woodsą methods are an appropriate method for regeneration (Croker and Boyer 1975, Neel 1993, Farrar 1993, 1996, Rudolph and Conner 1996). Because different disturbance patterns favor particular tree sizes, they can cause gaps in different sizes (Platt and Bradburn 1993, Palik and Patterson 1996).

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REFERENCES

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Boyer, W. D. 1974. Impact of prescribed fires on mortality of released and unreleased longleaf pine seedlings. Research Note SO-128. U.S.Department of Agriculture., Forest Service, Southern Forest Experiment Station, New Orleans.

Boyer, W. D. 1990. Growing-season burns for control of hardwoods in longleaf pine stands. Research Paper SO-256. U.S.Department of Agriculture., Forest Service, Southern Forest Experiment Station, New Orleans.

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