Southern Appalachian Highlands Research Articles

Pre‐Columbian Native American Use of Fire on Southern Appalachian Landscapes

Fire suppression in the southern Appalachians is widely considered responsible for decreased regeneration in oak (Quercus) and fire-adapted species such as table mountain pine (Pinus rigida) and pitch pine (Pinus pungens) (Barden & Woods 1976; Harmon 1982; Abrams 1992). How fire-adapted species survived in the southern Appalachian highlands in pre-Columbian times is an enigma; lightning-set fires are very infrequent (Harmon 1982; Bratton & Meier 1995) in this region of high annual precipitation. Barden and Woods (1976), Harmon (1982), and Abrams (1992) have speculated that in preColumbian times, Native American use of fire may have been important in the eastern deciduous forest region, but no published studies have documented that the use of fire by prehistoric Native Americans affected the composition of southern Appalachian vegetation. We evaluated the importance of pre-Columbian human impacts on vegetation of the southern Appalachian highlands by comparing the fossil pollen and charcoalparticle record preserved in peat deposited during the past 3900 calendar years in Horse Cove Bog, Highlands, North Carolina, with the archaeological record. We examined the implications of our fidings for conserving biodiversity and maintaining landscape heterogeneity using prescribed burning.

Land Ownership and Land‐Cover Change in the Southern Appalachian Highlands and the Olympic Peninsula

Social and economic considerations are among the most important drivers of landscape change, yet few studies have addressed economic and environmental influences on landscape structure, and how land ownership may affect landscape dynamics. Watersheds in the Olympic Peninsula, Washington, and the southern Appalachian highlands of western North Carolina were studied to address two questions: (1) Does landscape pattern vary among federal, state, and private lands? (2) Do land‐cover changes differ among owners, and if so, what variables explain the propensity of land to undergo change on federal, state, and private lands? Landscape changes were studied between 1975 and 1991 by using spatial databases and a time series of remotely sensed imagery. Differences in landscape pattern were observed between the two study regions and between different categories of land ownership. The proportion of the landscape in forest cover was greatest in the southern Appalachians for both U.S. National Forest and private lands, compared to any land‐ownership category on the Olympic Peninsula. Greater variability in landscape structure through time and between ownership categories was observed on the Olympic Peninsula. On the Olympic Peninsula, landscape patterns did not differ substantially between commercial forest and state Department of Natural Resources lands, both of which are managed for timber, but differed between U.S. National Forest and noncommercial private land ownerships. In both regions, private lands contained less forest cover but a greater number of small forest patches than did public lands. Analyses of land‐cover change based on multinomial logit models revealed differences in land‐cover transitions through time, between ownerships, and between the two study regions. Differences in land‐cover transitions between time intervals suggested that additional factors (e.g., changes in wood products or agricultural prices, or changes in laws or policies) cause individuals or institutions to change land management. The importance of independent variables (slope, elevation, distance to roads and markets, and population density) in explaining land‐cover change varied between ownerships. This methodology for analyzing land‐cover dynamics across land units that encompass multiple owner types should be widely applicable to other landscapes.

Ecosystem Management with Multiple Owners: Landscape Dynamics in a Southern Appalachian Watershed

Ecosystem management is emerging as an organizing theme for land use and resource management in the United States. However, while this subject is dominating professional and policy discourse, little research has examined how such systems‐level goals might be formulated and implemented. Effective ecosystem management will require insights into the functioning of ecosystems at appropriate scales and their responses to human interventions, as well as factors such as resource markets and social preferences that hold important influence over land and resource use. In effect, such management requires an understanding of ecosystem processes that include human actors and social choices. We examine ecosystem management issues using spatial models that simulate landscape change for a study site in the southern Appalachian highlands of the United States. We attempt to frame a set of ecosystem management issues by examining how this landscape could develop under a number of different scenarios designed to reflect historical land‐cover dynamics as well as hypothetical regulatory approaches to ecosystem management. Scenarios based on historical change show that recent shifts in social forces that drive land cover change on both public and private lands imply a more stable and a more forested landscape. Scenarios based on two hypothetical regulatory instruments indicate that public land management may have only limited influence on overall landscape pattern and that spatially targeted approaches on public and private lands may be more efficient than blanket regulation for achieving landscape‐level goals.

Mapping the radon potential of the United States: Examples from the Appalachians

The geologic radon potential of the United States was recently assessed by the U.S. Geological Survey. Results indicate that approximately 33% of the U.S. population lives within geologic provinces where the average indoor radon levels have the potential to be greater than 4 pCi/L (147 Bq/m 3). Rock types most commonly associated with high indoor radon include: 1) Uraniferous metamorphosed sediments, volcanics, and granite intrusives, especially those that are highly deformed or sheared. 2) Glacial deposits derived from uranium-bearing rocks and sediments. 3) Carboniferous, black shales. 4) Soils derived from carbonate rock, especially in karstic terrain. 5) Uraniferous fluvial, deltaic, marine, and lacustrine deposits. Different geologic terrains of the eastern United States illustrate some of the problems inherent in correlating indoor radon with geology. The Central and Southern Appalachian Highlands of the eastern United States have not been glaciated and most soils there are saprolitic, derived directly from the underlying bedrock. Regression analyses of bedrock geologic and radon parameters yeild positive correlations (R > 0.5 to 0.9) and indicate that bedrock geology can account for a significant portion of the indoor radon variation. In glaciated areas of the United States such as the northern Appalachian Highlands and Appalachian Plateau, the correlation of bedrock geology to indoor radon is obscured or is positive only in certain cases. In these glaciated areas of the country, it is the type, composition, thickness, and permeability of glacial deposits, rather than the bedrock geology, that controls the radon source.

Temperature Responses and Potential Range of the Grass Weed, Serrated Tussock (Nassella trichotoma), in the United States

In controlled-environment chambers, serrated tussock achieved maximum growth in temperature regimes of 18/11, 18/23, 24/23, or 24/17 C day/night. Growth was significantly reduced at 30/11 C, and no plants survived at 36/29 C. Serrated tussock seedlings grew slowly at first but eventually produced vigorous tussocks with as many as 2800 tillers after 140 d in the 24/17 C regime. Comparisons of climatic conditions in New South Wales, Victoria, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States revealed that similar temperature conditions occur during the warmest eight mo of the year in areas as diverse as Oregon, Washington, the Sierran Nevada foothills of California, upper elevation rangelands in Arizona, and the southern Appalachian highlands. None of these areas has a precipitation pattern similar to those of the sites of serrated tussock weed infestation in the Southern Hemisphere. However, poorly managed pastures and unimproved rangelands in these diverse areas may be vulnerable to invasion by serrated tussock, should the weed become established in the United States.

Resolved: That on Balance the Settlement Schools Were Harmful to the Culture of the Southern Mountains

Resolved: That on Balance the Settlement Schools Were Harmful to the Culture of the Southern Mountains by Harry Robie Editor's Note: We would like to see a response to Harry Robie's thesis about Settlement Schools in Appalachia. Among American Protestant Christians the response to the question, "Am I my brother's keeper," has almost always been "yes." In the Nineteenth Century that response was nowhere more clearly articulated than in large-scale missionary activity among the heathen wherever they could be found on the planet. Here in this country, the activity also extended to our "exceptional populations"—the Native Americans, Mormons, newly emancipated slaves, and other groups whose beliefs were most at variance with mainline religious practice. Among the people included in the missionary work were the white Protestant inhabitants of the Southern Appalachian highlands. Loyal Jones has written that "no group in the country . . . has aroused more suspicion and alarm among mainstream Christians than have Appalachian Christians, and never have so many Christian missionaries been sent to save so many Christians than is the case in this region" (Jones, 120). That endeavor began with Civil War and continues to this day in such programs as the Christian Appalachian Project, the United 6 Methodist Church's Red Bird Mission, and the work of a number of Christian colleges. The missionary activity, of course, has taken many forms, but, according to Henry Shapiro, one of its "principal fruits" was "the establishment of several hundred denominational and some dozen 'independent' schools in the southern mountains" (Shapiro, 42). Many of these institutions were "settlement schools"; that is, they attempted to change their charges by "total immersion ." Students not only studied; they ate, worked, and slept according to the desires of those who had come to save them from the devil and also, presumably , from themselves. It is the motives behind the origin of these institutions, primarily during the last half of the Nineteenth century, which I believe were suspect, and which ultimately worked to the detriment of mountain culture. Before we look at the schools themselves , however, we need to know why missionary boards felt there was a need to extend their efforts into the Appalachian Mountain chain. After all, in the years before mining became Appalachian principal economic activity, the region was inhabited largely by descendants of settlers from the British Isles, who spoke the same language and professed the same religion as their benefactors. In what way, then, could missionaries be considered as needing to be their brothers' and sisters' keepers in the Southern mountains? The answer is contained, I think, in the Nineteenth Century notion of Progress . The rest of the country, but particularly the Northeast, was considered to have "advanced" much further than had the Appalachian highlands. The quaint residents of these mountains, in the words of one Northerner called to save them, had become our "contemporary ancestors" (Frost, "Educational," 12). Nowhere was this primitive behavior more evident than in their practice of religion. Engaging in such strange rituals as footwashing and the lining of hymns, banning such "improvements" as musical instruments, professional clergy, and Sunday schools, the little independent churches of the hills were considered , at best, as out-of-date; at worst, as heretical. This latter view was particularly held by outsiders after they heard about the few hill congregations who took quite literally the words of Mark 16: 17-18 ("And these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover"). It was one thing to believe the Book which contained this passage was the Divine Word of God. It was quite another to put belief into practice by laying on hands or picking up a rattlesnake. One group that wanted to reform mountaineer religion was the American Missionary Association, founded in Boston in 1846 "for gathering and sustaining churches in heathen lands; from which the sins of caste, polygamy, slaveholding and the like shall be excluded." By 1848, only two years from its founding...