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Discussion and Conclusions

Plant communities of the South deserve many superlatives. They are exceptionally diverse, being rich in both the number of species and the number of endemic taxa. Forests of the South are also among the most heavily impacted in North America. They are severely fragmented, have experienced greater levels of human habitation for longer than any other forests in North America, and have the greatest number of exotic species. The native plant communities of the South have a history of increasingly intensive use, but recent changes in social attitudes are a source of great hope to those who appreciate the very special qualities of the native southern landscape. There is no chance that the South will ever see the communities that Cabeza de Vaca and De Soto saw, or even the relatively more modified landscapes first described by Bartram and Nuttall. In fact, continuing urbanization and population pressures will almost certainly conspire to keep the majority of the South’s landscape working hard to support its people (table 2.2). However, the remaining public land in the region is increasingly being managed for uses other than commodity production, and native plant community restoration and species protection activities on both public and private land are at an all-time high. Changes will continue into the future, most of them detrimental to the overall health of native plant communities in the South. Increasing human populations and resource demands will further fragment the remaining forests and natural areas. Invasive species will occupy increasingly larger proportions of the southern landscape. Global climate change will also impact the composition and distribution of plant communities in the South. However, increasing awareness of the value of forests and natural areas has slowed the pace of land conversion in the South, and recent efforts by State and Federal Government landowners to improve forest conditions through restoration suggest that, at least in part, some of the inevitable changes coming to southern native plant communities will be improvements. The native plant communities of the South will never be what they were, but if the future bring increasing functionality to the remaining intact ecosystems of the South, then the conservation and restoration efforts of today will have been successful.