Conecuh National Forest and the Return of the Longleaf

Three hundred years ago, longleaf pine forests covered roughly ninety million acres of the southeastern United States, from Virginia to east Texas. The forest type, which requires periodic fire to reproduce and suppress competing vegetation, supported one of the most biodiverse ecosystems in the temperate world: hundreds of plant species in the wire grass understory, gopher tortoises, indigo snakes, red-cockaded woodpeckers, and a dozen species found nowhere else on Earth. Today, less than three percent of the original longleaf extent remains. Conecuh National Forest in south Alabama is one of the places where the restoration is being tested at scale.

The Conecuh forest covers approximately eighty-three thousand acres in Covington and Escambia Counties, at the northern edge of the Florida panhandle's physiographic influence. The soils are sandy and well-drained, exactly the conditions longleaf evolved for, and the Forest Service has been using prescribed fire systematically since the nineteen eighties to burn back the competing hardwoods and shrubs that take over longleaf sites when fire is suppressed. The results are visible: in the areas that have received regular burning for two or more decades, the characteristic open park-like structure of the longleaf savanna has returned, with widely spaced pines, a continuous wire grass ground layer, and a species richness that was absent from the densely overgrown former plantation pines that occupied this land before restoration.

The gopher tortoise, which digs burrows used by more than three hundred other species, has responded to the restoration. The Conecuh forest holds one of the denser gopher tortoise populations in Alabama. The red-cockaded woodpecker, a federally protected species that excavates cavities only in living longleaf pines, has also returned in small but stable numbers.

Restoration ecology is slower than the original destruction was. The longleaf that took three centuries to clear will take decades to restore. Conecuh is evidence that the restoration is possible.