Habitat Management

The Oak Ridge Reservation (ORR) is covered with mostly contiguous native eastern deciduous hardwood forest. Within that framework are found many ecological communities (e.g., cedar barrens, river bluffs, wetlands) with unique biota, often including rare species.

Many research park habitats are managed to protect their ecosystem values, furnish food and shelter for wildlife, and provide sites for research and monitoring. Habitats that receive special attention include prairies, forests, and wetlands

PRAIRIES

Many of the natural prairies that once existed in east Tennessee have been lost or degraded as a result of suppression of fires and other disturbances, dumping of debris, development, or invasion by exotic species. The native grasses and wildflowers that grow in prairies provide habitats for wildlife that depend on those plants for cover, nesting, and food. Prairie communities that exist on the ORR include both naturally occurring cedar barrens and actively managed grasslands.

A Native Grass Community Management Plan for the Oak Ridge Reservation (ORNL/TM-2006/149) has been developed to define strategies to convert additional areas on the ORR to actively managed grasslands. Areas under consideration for such change are open habitats, including abandoned fields and rights of way. A recent presentation provides a status report on that program.

FORESTS

The ORR includes approximately 24,000 acres (9,712 ha) of relatively unfragmented mature eastern deciduous hardwood forest that provides habitat for numerous wildlife species. Such blocks of forested area are increasingly uncommon in both the region and nationwide.

The ORR is valuable not only for its large size, but also because many of its forest patches are larger than 50 contiguous acres (20 ha). These large patches of forest provide habitat for several plant and animal species not associated with smaller forest patches. This is especially true for certain increasingly rare bird species.

ORR forests are mostly oak-hickory, pine-hardwood, or pine. Minor areas of other hardwood-forest cover types are also found throughout the ORR, including northern hardwoods, a few small natural stands of hemlock or white pine, and floodplain forests.

The forests on the ORR are changing. There are, for example, many dead pine trees due to Southern pine beetle outbreaks and beaver activity. These dead trees provide nesting habitat for animals such as the red-headed woodpecker, a species once listed by the state of Tennessee as in need of management. The first infestations of the hemlock woolly adelgid on the ORR were detected in January 2008. The adelgid literally sucks the life from the tree and can kill it within as little as three years.