Sensitivity of Protection Value to Forest Condition in the Southern Appalachian Spruce-Fir Forest

Abstract

The southern Appalachian Mountains have a history of natural and anthropogenic disturbance. Wide-scale clear cutting of the region’s high-elevation red spruce (Picea rubens Sargent) and Fraser fir (Abies fraseri (Pursh) Poiret) forests began in the late 1800s and continued until the early decades of this century. By the 1920s, most of the accessible spruce-fir southern Appalachian had been mined for timber, reducing the spruce-fir forests from one-half to one-tenth their pre-European settlement extent (Korstian, 1937; Saunders, 1979). Occupying nearly 20,000 hectares, the rugged high-elevation forests of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park comprise the largest expanse of uncut spruce and fir. Nearly all of the remaining southern spruce-fir forests have been cut at least once and occur in and around the Black and Balsam Mountains in North Carolina, and Mount Rogers in Virginia (Dull et al., 1988; Pyle and Schafale, 1988).