Conservation Issues

Management of public land includes protecting biodiversity through ecosystem or landscape-level management. About 11 percent of the South’s forests are in a public ownership, and these areas tend to be concentrated in mountainous areas (fig. 45). For some rare communities, public lands are critical to conservation—for example, for protecting old-growth areas and high-elevation spruce-fir ecosystems in the Southern Appalachians. Often, however, rare plant communities and critically imperiled species do not occur on public land. The management of private forests, therefore, will have a substantial impact on the persistence of many species of concern in the South.

In the Coastal Plain and Piedmont, large blocks of public land are scarce, so ecosystem management strategies can only succeed through the cooperation of multiple landowners. Such collaborations are beginning to emerge. Land trusts have acquired land with high ecological value. Landscape-level consortiums are emerging to address ecosystem maintenance and restoration. Coordinated research and conservation have focused on understanding and restoring longleaf pine ecosystems.

The conservation value of public land may be high in some areas because public land can provide scarce interior forest habitat and older forests.

In urbanizing landscapes, public tracts can be factored into conservation strategies pursued by local planners. The principal vector of ecological change in these areas is fragmentation, and efforts to design development so some forest connectivity is retained could provide important habitat and other benefits, especially for neotropical migratory birds.

The effects of human activities on forests are pervasive, even where there is no direct management activity. Hence, conservation requires careful monitoring of forest conditions and active management responses, even in remote areas.

The exclusion of fire remains a critical and widespread issue affecting the health of terrestrial ecosystems. The impacts of fire exclusion from longleaf pine communities are now well understood, not only for pine management, but also for other associated plant and wildlife species. The impacts on other systems, such as upland hardwoods, are less well known but likely linked to ongoing forest health problems. While some progress has been made, the effective reintroduction of fire into forest ecosystems remains a critical forest conservation challenge in the South.