Southern Forest Futures Project is an exercise in forecasting what our forests might look like in the South about fifty years from now. Looking at a variety of things that might change within our forest, we really found that the main influencers of forests in the South are likely to be things like population growth, climate change, changes in markets, and the impacts of invasive species. And this is true for the South as a whole, but it's certainly true for the coastal plain as well.
The coastal plain is the largest subregion within the South. It encompasses parts of several states: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, and Arkansas--so just about all the states in the South. And it's the major breadbasket or wood-basket for the nation and indeed increasingly for the world. This is a major area of pine production and other pulp production, and so all of these impacts from population and climate and markets and invasives are likely to be quite pronounced in the coastal plain.