Summer 2005

What Lies Beneath?

by Zoë Hoyle

A Southern Research Station (SRS) biologist is looking at dormant seed banks as possible resources for restoring ground layer plants to areas where longleaf pine is being replanted.

The longleaf pine ecosystems that once stretched from Virginia to Texas harbor a rich diversity of ground layer plants. Though roughly 95 percent of the remaining longleaf forests are on dry sites, it is the very wet sites that produce the greatest diversity of understory plants--including some of the highest concentrations of threatened and endangered plant species in the Southeast.

Land managers from the private, industrial, and Federal sectors are replanting longleaf pine on land within its former range, mostly on sites that have been converted to agriculture or loblolly pine plantations--sites that have almost always lost the natural ground cover of the longleaf ecosystem. As we have seen, restoring the ground layer to areas where longleaf pine has been removed, often decades or more before, can be difficult.(...continued...)

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