Longleaf Pine Forests

When European settlers arrived in the South, longleaf pine forests dominated our coastal plain, covering more than 90 million acres from Virginia to Texas. Today, these open, park-like forests occupy less than 4 percent of their original range. Over the decades, they’ve been cleared for farming and development, or replaced by plantations of faster-growing pines, such as the loblolly.

What we’ve lost is an ecological treasure chest. More than two dozen federally protected plants and animals rely on the longleaf pine forest for their existence. And nearly 900 plant species are found in these forests and nowhere else.

Reviving Longleaf Pines Across Their Range

SELC is playing a leadership role in America’s Longleaf, a range-wide initiative to restore this imperiled ecosystem. America’s Longleaf seeks to maintain healthy longleaf forests, improve forests in poor condition, and restore forests where they’ve been lost.

To reach these goals, SELC is helping to coordinate a diverse array of nonprofit groups and government agencies that have a major stake in longleaf conservation―ranging from turkey hunters to the U.S. Department of Defense, which holds large stands of longleaf on southern military posts.

The Longleaf Conservation Plan

Healthy longleaf pine forests cover an estimated 1.5 million acres today, and another 1.9 million acres of longleaf is in need of improvement. The America’s Longleaf Initiative has developed a conservation plan that calls for expanding this ecosystem to 8 million acres over the next 15 years.

Developed with the help and advice of more than 120 natural resource professionals, the plan is built around identifying specific landscapes where conservation and restoration will have the greatest impact. The plan also maps these landscapes for the first time. Most of these places are anchored by a core of public land, such as a state game management area or a national forest, but much of the restoration effort will be focused on privately owned forests, which constitute 90 percent of our region’s forestlands.

The Role of Fire: A Burning Issue

As author Larry Earley has noted, “fire in longleaf pine forests is like rain in a rainforest.” The suppression of natural fire regimes has sped the decline of longleaf pine ecosystems, which depend on occasional fires to clear out competing species, promote seed germination, and prevent disease. Fulfilling the conservation plan’s goals will require increases in prescribed burns in key areas. Carefully managed fires will not only advance longleaf restoration, but will also reduce the threat of much larger wildfires.

Longleaf and Global Warming

Bringing back longleaf pine forests can be an effective strategy for reducing the impacts of global climate change and reining in global warming emissions. When compared with other types of pines, the highly resilient longleaf can better withstand hurricanes and other storm activity expected to increase with rising global temperatures. Moreover, this long-lived species is less susceptible to pests and can take up and store heat-trapping carbon dioxide for decades, even centuries.