The estimated wind damage from Katrina and Rita to forest resources was between $2 and $3 billion, with more than 5.5 million acres of timberland affected in the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Although financial estimates of timber losses provide an incomplete estimate of impacts, there is no doubt that effects from the hurricanes will linger for years to come. Many managers and landowners were caught unprepared to salvage timber quickly enough to recover value and prevent further damage from insects, invasive plants, and rot. Managing salvage while maintaining or recovering ecological values is another issue few land managers had planned for.

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita provided an opportunity to examine forest management objectives and how they could be used to reduce vulnerability to damage from future storms and to provide managers with the basis to make disaster plans. More resiliency in ecosystems and social systems is the key. A resilient system is one that can absorb recurring disturbances such as hurricanes while retaining essential structures, processes, and functions. Like the old Timex watch commercial, a resilient system can “take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’.” Southern Research Station scientists work with a wide range of partners to provide the information needed to adapt southern forests and landowners to changing conditions, whether natural disaster, climate conditions, or land use change.

In this issue of Compass, we don’t presume to address the depth of human suffering associated with the 2005 hurricanes, or to offer analysis of social systems. Our focus on hurricane effects on forest resources may seem at first somewhat narrow, but we believe that the importance of forests lies not only in timber values, but also in the innumerable “ecosystem services” forests provide—from habitat for myriad species, to places for people to rest and recreate, to carbon storage banks to offset climate change, to alternative sources of energy.

In this issue, we’ll go into detail about the steps landowners and homeowners can take to manage storm damage to their trees. We’ll look at how Katrina affected a long-term experiment on an experimental forest in Mississippi, including findings that longleaf pine—once the dominant tree species in coastal areas—is surprisingly hurricane-resistant when compared to other pine species. We’ll see how what we’ve learned from previous hurricanes came into play when Rita threatened red-cockaded woodpecker habitat in Texas, and how arborists across the United States responded when urban foresters along the Gulf Coast needed help saving their city trees.

Lessons learned from Katrina and Rita will not only help forest managers prepare for future hurricanes, but more readily adapt to a reality where constant and often severe natural disturbance is the norm. The future isn’t what it used to be. Managers need to focus on the extremes rather than the averages, and to expect abrupt as well as gradual change.