History

Pre-European Forests

Both upland and bottomland hardwood forests of the Southeastern United States were manipulated by Native Americans for thousands of years prior to the advent of Europeans (Carroll and others 2002). Native Americans used fire for many purposes. They controlled the composition and pattern of vegetation by frequently burning the southern landscape. They burned to manage wildlife habitat, ease travel, expose acorns and chestnuts, improve visibility, encourage fruiting, prepare their fields for planting, and to facilitate hunting and defense (Bonnicksen 2000, Pyne and others 1996, Williams 1989). Frequent low-intensity burning by Native Americans created a southern landscape of prairies, fields, savannas, woodlands, and dense forests. The southern hardwood forest was hardly a dense, old-growth landscape at the time of European discovery. The myth of low-impact management by Native Americans may have been reinforced by the fact that the major European occupation of interior America came after native populations had been devastated by diseases introduced by earlier European immigrants.

Some areas were burned on an annual basis and, if burning continued over long periods, became prairies or balds. Other areas, such as north-facing coves in the Southern Appalachians and frequently flooded bottomland forests, burned infrequently. Between these two extremes were forest communities that burned at varying intervals, thus creating a mosaic of forest conditions throughout the South. In the hardwood forests of the South, anthropogenic fires were complemented by occasional lightning-ignited fires (Carroll and others 2002).

Post-European Effects

The European settlers who displaced the Native Americans from the upland forests continued to burn the forest frequently to encourage forage production for their livestock (Pyne and others 1996). However with the advent of steam power for harvesting and processing of timber, wide-scale logging and the slash it produced created a different type of fire regime. High-intensity, stand-replacement fires ignited by sparks from locomotives followed logging and burned vast acreages of upland forests from the late 1880s though the early 1930s (Brose and others 2001).

Fire protection efforts begun early in the 20^th century gradually became more effective and allowed the forests to develop—for the first time in millennia—in the absence of fire. However decades of fire exclusion had unintended consequences. The development of dense understories and midstories of shade-tolerant shrubs and trees is now a major contributor to the oak regeneration problem. In other areas, rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum L.) and mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia L.) thickets have become so dense and expansive that the species diversity of cove forests is threatened. Because of these problems, there is renewed interest in using prescribed fire as a management tool in upland hardwood forests (Yaussy 2000).

Villages of early European colonists were almost always located along major streams. A rice culture developed, first in the vicinity of Charleston, SC, and then elsewhere along the Southeastern U.S. coast. On the fringes of the rice paddies and beyond, corn, wheat, and cotton supplanted hardwood forests.

Following attempts to control water flow in the major alluvial floodplains, first by private enterprise and then by public agencies, especially the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the forests were increasingly cleared for agricultural crops. Only about half of the original bottomland forests remained by the 1930s. From the 1930s to the 1980s, the bottomland forest area was further reduced from 11.8 to 4.3 million acres as a result of drainage and clearing for agriculture. Conversion was especially rapid during the 1960s and 1970s when the price for farm crops, especially soybeans, reached unprecedented levels.