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2 Introduction

Native plant communities in the South have been much studied and written about since the Bartrams explored the region in the 18^th century (Bartram 1791). Bartram noted that Native Americans as well as European settlers altered native plant communities by intentional burning, land clearing for agriculture, clearcutting of timber, and introductions of exotic species from Europe and the Caribbean. The plant communities of the South were not pristine in Bartram's time, and they were not pristine when Europeans first arrived on these shores. The southern landscape had already seen 10,000 years of human history. The last 400 years, however, have brought more radical changes than any caused by Native Americans.

Today's landscape and vegetation are not only the result of a very long history of change; they are also the starting point of tomorrow's vegetation. To better understand the resource at hand, it is valuable to remind ourselves of how we got here so that, perhaps, we can do better in the future. For the purposes of this Assessment, a native plant community is defined as:

A set of populations of plants naturally indigenous to an area that are interacting to the extent and degree that would have been observed prior to European settlement and share critical physiognomic and compositional traits.

It is somewhat arbitrary to confine the limits of what is natural to a pre-European timeframe, but it is impossible to separate the influences of native cultures from the "historical" landscape. And, even at the height of aboriginal culture in the Southeastern United States, Native Americans were not able to impact the native vegetation to the degree that the Europeans have.

Plant communities, both native and otherwise, are defined not only by their inter- and intra-specific interactions and composition -- which species are present and in what numbers-- but also by their structure. Major structural elements include seral stage; the relative abundance, age distribution, spatial arrangement of dominant species in each canopy layer; as well as physical metrics such as the height, size, and spatial arrangement of individuals. Natural disturbances such as hurricane blowdowns, ice storms, and drought are common events that markedly influence the structural condition of plant communities and have contributed to the perpetuation of a full spectrum of structural and seral conditions.