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Compared to earlier periods, land use in the South has been fairly stable since 1945. The most notable exception is Florida, where developed land uses have expanded substantially. However, an evaluation of land use dynamics between 1982 and 1992 indicates that while total forest area has been stable, the stability is the result of substantial offsetting changes into and out of forest cover. As a result, much of the southern forest landscape has experienced significant change.
Two dominant forces strongly influenced recent land use changes: (1) urbanization driven by population and general economic growth and (2) changing relative returns to agriculture and timber production. We expect their influences to continue. As a result of anticipated population and economic growth, rural land will be converted to urban uses. As a result of increases in timber prices, some agricultural land will become forested. Depending on assumptions about future timber prices, forecasts of land uses indicate that the South could experience a net loss of from 8 to 12 million acres of forest land (roughly 5 to 8 percent) between 1992 and 2020.
Forest losses are likely to be concentrated in four areas: (1) the Piedmont and Mountain areas of North Carolina, (2) adjacent Piedmont areas of South Carolina and Georgia, (3) northern peninsular Florida, and (4) the Atlantic and gulf coastal areas. Other areas with substantial projected losses are around the cities of Nashville, TN, and Birmingham, AL, and in northern Virginia between Washington, DC, and Richmond, VA.
Gains in forest land at the expense of agriculture are likely in other regions of the South. In the eastern part of the South, forest gains are possible in two relatively small areas: (1) the upper Coastal Plain of Georgia and (2) an area centered on the boundary between North Carolina and Virginia in the Coastal Plain. In the western part of the South, forest gains are possible in the lower Gulf Coastal Plain in Alabama and in large portions of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Overall losses in forest in the eastern part of the region will likely be offset by gains primarily in the western part of the region.
This information may prove useful to policy analysts as they design afforestation policies. Cost-share programs such as the Forestry Incentives Program have long been popular conservation instruments in the United States. Our analysis suggests that certain areas are more prone to shift agricultural land to forest cover based on land quality and economics. Afforestation policies could be made more effective if they were targeted to these areas.
Forecasts of a forest population density index indicate that the potential influence of urban areas on forests extends far beyond city cores. As population density increases, so does the valuation and use of these forests. For example, forest benefits such as recreation and microclimate moderation increase in value in an urbanizing area. Timber management is generally inversely correlated with population density (Wear and others 1999). In these areas, therefore, timber harvesting is likely to be associated with land use conversions, and not with ongoing forest management. Another effect of urbanization is the division of large blocks of forests into smaller tracts or parcels. This increases the number of landowners, thereby complicating land management especially with regard to the use of fire.
While studies of growth and development tend to focus on urban areas, changes in population and forests are also occurring in the South’s rural areas. As a result, the area in what has been called the “wildland-urban interface” is growing rapidly. Problems with interactions between people and forested systems therefore can also be expected to grow.
Evaluation of the spatial structure of forests identified parts of the South where the share of forest cover is relatively high but the forest is highly fragmented. This condition is especially common in some northern portions of the South, on the Southern Appalachian Piedmont, and in northern Florida. The effect of forest loss on habitat structure generally increases as the fragmentation of an area increases. In fragmented forests, small changes in the amount of forest cover may have disproportionate impacts on the connectivity of forested habitats (Turner and others 1989).
A synthesis of findings suggests several “hotspots” where changes in land use and forest conditions portend important negative impacts on the services provided by forests. They are:
The same kind of effects are being concentrated in urbanizing areas surrounding the following cities:
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content: David N. Wear |
created: 4-OCT-2002 |