Southern Research Station Headquarters - Asheville, NC
![[Images] Five photos of different landscape](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20130226125506im_/http://srs.fs.usda.gov/images/imstr1.jpg "[Images] Five photos of different landscape")
Issue 9
Upland Hardwood Forests in Transition
If only it were that easy.
If you live in the mountain andhighland areas of the South, you see oaks all around you every day. You may wonder why we would devote an entire issue of Compass to upland hardwood forests, and oak regeneration in particular. Surely the mighty oak is not in danger of dying out?
You might be surprised to find out that upland oak-hickory forests in the Southern highlands have declined by an estimated 70 percent since European settlement. The forests you see today are less than a century old, having grown up after widespread logging and other practices that radically changed forest structure and species composition. Until the early 20th century, the American chestnut was very prominent in upland hardwood forests; by the 1950s, American chestnuts were gone, and oaks had taken the dominant position. Now in their 70s and 80s, this cohort of oaks is aging, becoming more susceptible to death from insects, diseases, and oak decline.
Meanwhile, there’s also been a decline in oak regeneration, due to the inability of seedlings that sprout from acorns to grow large enough to be competitive with other species when the overstory on high-quality (moisture, good soil) upland hardwood sites is removed. The problem is that faster growing trees such as maples from stump sprouts and yellowpoplars outgrow the slower growing small oak seedlings. As time goes on, the overstory of the forest becomes dominated by maples or yellowpoplars, and the oaks—which provide Upland Hardwood Forests in Transition food and shelter to a wide range of animals and birds as well as producing high-quality timber—become fewer and fewer.
Oak Regeneration Redux
David Loftis, project leader of the SRS Upland Hardwood Ecology and Management unit (upland hardwoods unit), first came to work at the Bent Creek Experimental Forest in the 1970s. By then, researchers already knew that even though you might have thousands of new oak seedlings from a good acorn crop, less then 5 percent would survive under a dense canopy of overstory trees. They also knew that if you wanted more oaks you had to increase the light reaching the forest floor enough to promote the growth of oak seedlings, but not enough to stimulate sprouting of yellow-poplars from the seed bank. What they didn’t know was just how to do this.
Loftis started designing and setting out studies to look at this question in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, and over time has become the acknowledged expert in oak regeneration in the Southern Appalachians. In the past few years, his unit has expanded across the range of upland hardwood forests into the Cumberland Plateau, and even further west into the highlands of Arkansas. The unit has also expanded into wildlife research as managing forests to provide habitat for different creatures has become a major objective for natural resource managers across private, State, and Federal ownerships.
In this issue of Compass, we will explore research studies across the range of upland hardwood forests in the South, looking at silvicultural and wildlife research, as well as combinations of the two. We’ll look at a project in Kentucky designed to reduce the damage of an insect pest before it ever arrives, and catch up on the latest news and research about sudden oak death. We’ll also offer tips about what you as a resource manager or private landowner can do to promote oaks on your own property.
