Forgotten Hardwood Forests of the Coastal Plain

Abstract

THE destruction and alteration of upland ecosystems on the Atlantic coastal plain of the United States have received little attention, particularly in comparison with wetland and longleaf pine ecosystems. The purpose of this article is threefold: to show that hardwoods were far more common in precolonial times than is generally believed, that upland hardwood forests have been the most ruthlessly exploited ecosystem on the coastal plain, and that the decline of hardwood upland forest has been far more severe than has that of any wetlands in the region. The details of this study are confined to the North Carolina portion of the coastal plain, but the basic trends are applicable to its entire southeastern expanse. This article illustrates the principle that conservation efforts are often focused on essentially marginal lands, where remnants of relatively undisturbed landscapes and ecosystems exist. Landscapes and ecosystems associated with the best land have usually been so thoroughly altered that public recognition of the problem is limited, with few efforts to preserve or restore them. LONGLEAF PINE FORESTS There has long been a misconception that Pinus palustris is the dominant upland tree in undisturbed coastal-plain forests. Pioneering foresters Gifford Pinchot and W. W. Ashe (1897) asserted that the forest on the North Carolina coastal plain before European contact was mostly longleaf pine and described and mapped a portion of this forest that extended almost unbroken to Virginia. An early-twentieth-century map of vegetation in the United States generalized the entire Atlantic coastal plain as southern mesophytic evergreen forest (Livingston and Shreve 1921). Early soil surveys likewise reported longleaf pine as the original vegetation on the most common upland soils (Bureau of Chemistry and Soils 1924, 1928, 1929, 1935). The myth of a continuous longleaf forest across the coastal plain, interrupted only by swamps and other wetlands, persists in relatively recent scholarly endeavors (Clark 1984; Williams 1989; Walker 1991). According to many biogeographers and ecologists, longleaf dominate only on the driest and sandiest coastal-plain uplands, where fire is a crucial element in establishing and maintaining longleaf-dominated forests and savannas (Wells 1928, 1942). The map of potential natural vegetation does not indicate longleaf-dominated uplands throughout the region (Kuchler 1964), and recent natural-community inventories give a more realistic appraisal of the original extent of the longleaf (Frost, LeGrand, and Schneider 1990; LeGrand, Frost, and Fussell 1992). Considerable evidence validates that the longleaf pine was found primarily on the sandiest, droughtiest, most excessively drained land or on wet, sandy, relatively sterile soils. A study made shortly before the Civil War found the pine only on dry, soil and considered occurrence of the species indicative of a sterile soil (Ruffin 1861). Although Ruffin implied that longleaf pine was restricted to those sites because it been eliminated from more favorable settings, earlier accounts suggested differently. Observations from the mid-1770s noted open pine forests, which were most likely longleaf savannas, on sand hills in southeastern North Carolina (Bartram 1791, 473-477). Bartram also concluded that generally occupied places on the coastal plain from Florida to the Carolinas (Bartram 1791, xvi). Land west of the Dismal Swamp on the coastal plain along the North Carolina-Virginia border had all the marks of poverty, being for the most part and full of pines (Byrd 1728). An even earlier account contained a report from a 1663 sailing on the Cape Fear River that described as growing, for the most part, in barren and sandy situations (Lawson 1709, 74). UPLAND HARDWOOD FORESTS Biogeographers and ecologists have long asserted that minimally disturbed mesic uplands in the coastal plain will develop hardwood forests. …