S.7 Ep.6: The Fire Forest: Restoring the Long-leaf Pine

 What tree begins life looking more like a tuft of grass, survives repeated fires for years on the forest floor, and then suddenly bolts toward the canopy in a remarkable growth spurt? The longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) is one of the most unique and ecologically important tree species in North America. Once dominating the coastal plains of the southeastern United States, longleaf pine forests have been reduced to less than 5% of their historic range. Yet these forests remain among the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the continent. In this episode of SilviCast, we explore the fascinating life history of longleaf pine and the silvicultural practices being used to restore these iconic forests. Join us for a conversation with Steve Jack, Executive Director of Boggy Slough Conservation Area, who shares insights from decades of longleaf pine restoration work across the southern United States. 

Guest on the Episode:
Steve Jack, Ph.D.
Director of the Boggy Slough Conservation Area

Dr. Steve Jack is the founding executive director of the Boggy Slough Conservation Area (BSCA), a 19,000-acre property near Lufkin, Texas owned by the T.L.L. Temple Foundation. In that role Steve leads the foundation’s vision for BSCA “to serve as a model of excellence for East Texas through ecological research and outreach to promote conservation, management, and stewardship of natural resources.” Prior to BSCA, Steve spent over two decades at the Jones Center at Ichauway in southwest Georgia, focused on the management and restoration of longleaf pine. He has a BS from Erskine College in SC, a MS from University of Florida, and a PhD from Utah State University.

Show Notes
The Longleaf Alliance
America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative
Silvics of Longleaf Pine (digital manual)
The Art of Managing Longleaf (book)
Ecological Restoration and Management of Longleaf Pine Forests (book)
Multiple Value Management: The Stoddard-Neel Approach to Ecological Forestry in Longleaf Pine Grasslands (outreach publication)

Transcript

S7 E6 - Longleaf Pine

[Greg Edge]

Welcome to Silvicast, the podcast about all things silviculture. I'm Greg Edge, retired silviculturist with the Wisconsin DNR Division of Forestry.

[Brad Hutnik]

And I'm Brad Hutnik, Wisconsin DNR silviculturist, still keeping the lights on for you. And we're your hosts for today's show. Guten Morgen, Gregor.

[Greg Edge]

Hey there, Brad. I got a question for you. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Okay.

[Greg Edge]

I want you to guess what the theme of today's show is. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Oh, the theme. You mean like, like there's a theme like to the Brady Bunch or, you know, like...

[Greg Edge]

Not a song theme. No. No.

[Brad Hutnik]

Oh, so it's like a topic?

[Greg Edge]

Yeah. Our episode theme. Come on.

[Brad Hutnik]

Okay. And first off, we have a theme? I mean, we kind of like...

[Greg Edge]

Where have you been the last seven years? 

[Brad Hutnik]

Well, don't we…  It's... Yeah, we start... 

[Greg Edge]

Yes, of course we have a theme every week.

[Brad Hutnik]

But we, we kind of wing it too, Greg. I mean, it's like, it's a theme, but it's more like a structured winging, right?

[Greg Edge]

Forget it. 

[Brad Hutnik]

All right. 

[Greg Edge]

Today, I'm just going to tell you.

[Brad Hutnik]

All right. 

[Greg Edge]

Today's theme is about personal growth. It's about stepping out of your Bradley's comfort zone.

[Brad Hutnik]

Okay. Okay. Now, timeout, timeout. First, you're assuming I have a comfort zone because...

You want me to talk about my... I think we should be talking about your comfort zone. And if there's any, anyone around here who has like, you know, like that buttoned up little bitty area that you live in where it's a comfort zone, my friend, my friend, there's a spot in Lacrosse where that comfort zone is like...

[Greg Edge]

This isn't about me, Brad. This is about you. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Oh, boy. I think I've heard that from a girlfriend before. It's not me. It's you. 

[Greg Edge]

Okay. Maybe she did this then. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. I think we got married.

[Greg Edge]

Let's start with a little quiz, Brad. I'm sure I can find something about assessing your comfort zone online.

So we know that it's all fair and square. So just a minute. Here we go.

[Brad Hutnik]

All right. 

[Greg Edge]

Okay. Yeah. Oh, here's one. Here's one. Let's try this one.

[Brad Hutnik]

Oh, boy. 

[Greg Edge]

I found one on this psychologia.co. I have no idea what this is going to assess, but we're going to go for it. Ready? 

[Brad Hutnik]

You're sure this isn't Cosmopolitan you're getting this from or some... 

[Greg Edge]

No, I didn't see one on Cosmo. Yeah. No. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Okay. Okay. All right. 

[Greg Edge]

You ready?

[Brad Hutnik]

It's not Field and Stream. I know that. So, all right.

[Greg Edge]

No. 

[Brad Hutnik]

All right. 

[Greg Edge]

Question one.

I trust my intuition. True, false, I don't know, maybe. 

[Brad Hutnik]

True.

[Greg Edge]

Okay. 

[Brad Hutnik]

I trust your intuition? That's a different question.

[Greg Edge]

I won't begin a new project unless I believe I can be successful at it. True, false, I don't know, maybe.

[Brad Hutnik]

I wouldn't start new projects if I thought they were all going to be successful. So, I would say, no, we're just starting projects.

[Greg Edge]

That's totally, totally false. Okay. Okay.

Others think of me as unconventional. True, false, I don't know, maybe. 

[Brad Hutnik]

That's got to be false, Greg.

[Greg Edge]

What?

[Brad Hutnik]

 I say it just to get a reaction out of you. Sometimes you got to throw things out there just to get a reaction. I don't know. That's a good question.

[Greg Edge]

Others think of me as unconventional. Okay. I'm going to answer this for you.

[Brad Hutnik]

All right. 

[Greg Edge

That would be a true one. 

[Brad Hutnik]

All right.

[Greg Edge

I don't like to be around indecisive people. True, false, I don't know, maybe.

[Brad Hutnik]

False. Because I can be around everybody. 

[Greg Edge]

Okay.

[Brad Hutnik]

I mean, I want them driving the car, but I think I could be around them.

[Greg Edge]

Oh, geez. I know the answer to this one. I like to discuss my ideas with friends.

True, false, I don't know, maybe.

[Brad Hutnik]

 My God. I can't have an idea without discussing it with somebody.

[Greg Edge]

It just spills out before you even think.

[Brad Hutnik]

It's there. Yeah.

[Greg Edge]

Okay. I like to guess something, then check it to find out whether or not I was right. 

[Brad Hutnik]

I would say, yeah, I'm always full of ideas.

[Greg Edge]

You guess stuff all the time.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah, all the time.

[Greg Edge]

You're always guessing stuff. 

[Brad Hutnik]

I always like that phrase, always certain, often wrong. 

[Greg Edge]

Okay.  I like to begin new projects and see how it'll all pan out. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Giddy up.

[Greg Edge]

That's true. I play games for fun and not for the sake of winning.

[Brad Hutnik]

You know, I think that's true. I think that's true.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, You don't really care about it. 

[Brad Hutnik]

I play pickleball, and I don't have to win.

[Greg Edge]

Oh, this is a long survey. Hold on. Almost done.

Almost done. I will never do something that others didn't try before me.

[Brad Hutnik]

Oh, I would say that's false. I would try things just to try things. Yeah.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah. Yeah. Usually, I don't worry about my mistakes.

Oh, yeah, that's true. You don't care.

[Brad Hutnik]

Well, it's not that I don't care, Greg. It's just that I don't worry about it. I care, but the worry is a different thing.

[Greg Edge]

Hard to tell the difference there. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. Well, okay. I'll give you that one. 

[Greg Edge]

I don't like to speak in public. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah, that's not.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, that's false. 

[Brad Hutnik]

I mean, I don't mind that part. 

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, you're fine with that. Not knowing the right answer about something won't stop me. I will make my best guess and move on. Oh, my God, that's true.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah, Greg, I don't know where the mystery is in that part. 

[Greg Edge]

Okay, last one. I resist change at work or at home.

[Brad Hutnik]

I would say false. I'm all for change.

[Greg Edge]

I don't know. Okay.

[Brad Hutnik]

Well, like, what kind of change are we talking about? 

[Greg Edge]

Since we're running short on time here, I'm going to get the results. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Oh, boy.

[Greg Edge]

Okay, here are the results. Brad. 

[Brad Hutnik]

I'm a hippie.

[Greg Edge]

You are a bold, daring, thrill-seeking person. You are very comfortable at taking risks and challenge your comfort zone. So, in other words, you don't really have a comfort zone.

[Brad Hutnik]

I was going to say, I don't know about thrill-seeking. That doesn't quite fit… seem right, but I'm okay with trying things and things not working out.

[Greg Edge]

 Okay. Well, that was interesting. I think you fell kind of where I thought you might fall. So, thank you.

Thank you for taking that deep dive into your psyche. I know we're all a little bit traumatized, but I think we'll move on. 

[Brad Hutnik]

Oh, boy.

[Greg Edge]

So, another question for you. Do you think there is also such a thing as a silvicultural comfort zone? 

[Brad Hutnik]

Ooh. I would say yes. And, actually, that I think we all fall into. Like, we all get used to living in that envelope of, here's what we do.

And when you look outside of it, boy, that's where the dragons lie. 

[Greg Edge]

Yeah. Harder to challenge yourself to try something new sometimes. You may be wondering where all this is going. I know that.

Today, we're venturing outside of our silvicultural comfort zone to discuss a tree species that has always fascinated me, and I think you, too, but I've never worked with it here in the Lake States, and that is longleaf pine, Pinus palustris.

[Brad Hutnik]

Very good. A little bit of a roundabout way to get to our theme or our topic. But, you know, I'm all about, just like we talked about, I'm all about, like, blowing up the comfort zone.

Silvicultural, personal, you name it, Greg. Let's just blow them all up today. And I bet from a silvicultural perspective, we'll be talking about this one because there'll be lessons we learn here that we can apply elsewhere.

And I think that's where maybe the real value of getting outside the comfort zone is.

[Greg Edge]

Well, hold on to those thoughts because we'll be talking today with someone who has spent decades studying and restoring longleaf pine forests. So, today on Silvicast, we'll be speaking with Dr. Steve Jack, Executive Director of Boggy Slough Conservation Area, whose organization conducts research, conservation, and outreach to promote the natural resources of East Texas and beyond. And Steve has worked in longleaf pine efforts across southern U.S. and is the co-editor of the book, Ecological Restoration and Management of Longleaf Pine Forests. 

[Brad Hutnik]

You had me at Boggy Slough. 

[Greg Edge]

Thank you to our season sponsors, Family Forest Carbon Program and Nelson Paint Company. You make the Silvicast world go round.

[Brad Hutnik]

Steve Jack, welcome to Silvicast. For our listeners, can you tell us a little bit about where you work and what you do?

[Steve Jack]

Well, thanks for the opportunity to be here today. Right now, I work at the Boggy Slough Conservation Area in East Texas, so in the piney woods of Texas, not a wide open range country that you see in the movies. It's a 19,000 acre property owned by a private family foundation, and it's been managed for forestry for a long time.

But now we manage it for conservation objectives and do a lot of research and outreach on using the property as the living laboratory, like a lot of people say, for that kind of work.

[Greg Edge]

And you've been working in these forest types for a long time. We had been talking earlier. You worked at the Jones Center in Georgia, you said.

[Steve Jack]

That's right, yeah. And, you know, since we're talking about longleaf pine today, a lot of that longleaf experience is from the Jones Center. I was there for 22 years working, went there, involved primarily in research, but converted into a position where I managed the forest lands and did a lot of the longleaf pine management, as well as the outreach and some research with all the scientists there.

So we have a similar sort of program here at Boggy Slough, but not near the size or the resources that they have at the Jones Center, but similar sorts of missions.

[Greg Edge]

Cool. Brad and I are really excited to talk about a species we never get to talk about, longleaf pine with you. We've been kind of mulling this idea around for a while because we've thought, oh, that's a really cool species and there's just so much around it and we know nothing about it.

So we're like, oh, we should do a show on it. I know a lot of our listeners are in the Lake States and the Northeast, so they don't have this species, but I really think there's probably some lessons learned from working with longleaf pine that we can apply in our northern pine systems as well. And probably you're a lot further along on managing those pine ecosystems than us.

So I'm excited about that conversation.

[Brad Hutnik]

You know, Greg, it's interesting. I and Steve, you know, I think the only thing I know about longleaf is that there was an author I've read, Tom Kelly, who wrote Tenth Legion and Better on a Rising Tide. Greg would appreciate this.

It's about turkey hunting, but he was a forester and he talks about a love affair with longleaf pine. So I've always like, okay, there's got to be something special about it.

[Steve Jack]

Yeah. And a lot of people feel that way. It's a species that draws people in just because of the kind of forest structure, the things that we'll talk about today, the aesthetics of being out in there and the wildlife species that are associated with it.

A lot of people, once they get close to it and learn about it, they fall in love with that species, which is why it's gotten a lot of attention in the last 30 years or so.

[Greg Edge]

And I didn't really realize until I started doing some reading for this show just kind of the significance of the longleaf pine ecosystem in the South. Can you tell us a little bit about what that, like, historically, that range looked like in the South? And what does it look like today?

[Steve Jack]

Yeah. So historically, it ranged all the way from southern Virginia down into the Florida Peninsula and then along the Gulf Coast out to where I'm at in Texas. But it was a coastal plain species, except for an outlier.

There is a mountain longleaf pine that you find in northern Alabama and Georgia. It got up into that area, but it grows a little bit differently. It's not a separate species, but it behaves a little bit differently in those systems.

But primarily, it's a coastal plain species, so a pretty wide distribution. And by the reports, historically, it was pretty continuous forest throughout a lot of that coastal plain range. And, you know, it was significant initially.

The use of it was for the products that people got from that longleaf forest. So the wood products, the lumber that you get out of it is very good, especially those older trees that grew slowly through a lot of years. And so a lot of that wood was harvested.

And actually, a lot of it was shipped to the northeast, so from Baltimore north. And a lot of those big timbers in the old warehouses were longleaf pine. And so that's actually where you can find some of that rescued wood is from the northeast.

And, you know, it's just kind of an interesting sidelight. So the wood was used extensively for a lot of buildings in the south, but also, again, up into the north. But it also was used for the naval stores, so turpentine, a lot of it, because it has good resin flow and all of that.

So when it was first encountered, that's what it was used for. It was harvested a lot and used for the products and then also for the naval stores. But its regeneration is not as easy as a lot of the other species.

So when those forests were cut heavily and not many mature trees were left, the distribution of longleaf pine fell off drastically. So the initial harvest in our part of the country from, say, 1900 on through the 1920s, took out a lot of that longleaf pine and it didn't really regenerate a lot because of the way, the regeneration patterns that it has. So now the range, if you look at it geographically, it extends across those, that same area, the coastal plains from Virginia out to Texas.

But it's now just isolated pockets. You don't have that large tracts of continuous forest. The statistics that people have done from the historic range to what it was, say, in the early 1990s, was only about 3% of the existing acreage was left, which you would classify as longleaf pine forest.

So it's still there and there's actually been a lot of restoration work in recent years. But it's nowhere near as prevalent as it once was on the landscape.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, I know online, through some of the organizations you described, there's some really good maps. And I noticed that it still had the same distribution overall, but just very restricted populations. And so that's interesting.

I know, you know, we have the cutover period in the Lake States, similarly for white pine, but that seed source stayed around in a lot of cases, and maybe the regeneration isn't as difficult with that species. So it's been growing. It's one of our fastest developing species across its original range.

Right.

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, the dispersal of the longleaf pine seed is, it doesn't go very far from the parent tree. So if you've got just a few scattered trees, it's hard to get very much regeneration out there.

[Brad Hutnik]

You know, this is a species, I think a lot of times about like silvics of species. Like once you understand the sylvics, then you get a little more about it. And of course, I know nothing about longleaf sylvics.

So maybe just like real basics on it. Like you said, coastal plain. Are there, are there, but what about the coastal plain?

Or is there something about maybe site preference or something that kind of made it stay there?

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, some of it, when people have looked at it, some of it is the soils and the site conditions that you find it on. Oftentimes people think about longleaf pine being found only on dry, well-drained, sandy soils. And it does, that is where we find it a lot of times these days.

But it can grow on better quality sites. It's just not as competitive or fast growing as a lot of other species. So it, it tends to lose out.

Part of that is the seedling type that it has, the grass stage that we can talk about. But, so there, there are some site conditions, but you can find it on good sites. You can find it, there is a component on the wet flatwoods down in North Florida.

So it can grow on those wet soils as well. It's just competitively, it does really well on those drier soils and can survive, establish, and grow better on those soils than a lot of the other species. So that's where people tend to find it these days.

But the coastal plain, that, a lot of what people think on that is actually ice loading as you get up into the Piedmont and other more northern climates. Because it has very large branch structures. So if you get a lot of icing, then on those large branches, they collect a lot of weight.

They tend to break off and they don't, they don't do as well. In a lot of ways, that's why it's, it's restricted more to the coastal plain. Some of it's a site, some of it's the icing, some of it's just the other species.

When you get up into the Piedmont in the south, you get the loblolly pine, that's more of its natural habitat. And it grows really well, really fast on some of those Piedmont soils. And if you got both of those species, loblolly pines are going to grow a lot faster and overtop the longleaf pine.

[Brad Hutnik]

Is it a long-lived species?

[Steve Jack]

It is. It's the longest-lived of the southern pines. In the few remnant old-growth pieces that are left, the tracks that are left, you can find trees pretty easily 300 years old, and they've even documented some up to almost 500 years old.

So it is the longest-lived, and it's like a lot of the tree species. It's a slower grower initially, but it hangs on for a long time. It has a lot of adaptations to tolerate the bugs and diseases and things like that that some of the other species don't have as much.

[Greg Edge]

What about tolerance levels, Steve? You mentioned kind of the competitive nature of it not winning out with maybe some of the more aggressive species, but is it a sun-loving species, or will it reproduce in shade?

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, that's an interesting question, and something that research examined a lot and found some interesting characteristics. In the early silvics manuals, it was classified as highly shade intolerant, and a lot of the initial subcultural systems were to provide it lots of sunlight, lots of growing space to get it growing. And it does grow well in full sun.

It does well with that. But actually, when people examined it, some of this work was at the Jones Center early on by Bob Mitchell and Brian Pallack, actually, and then some others found that the seedlings can establish and do okay underneath some canopy trees, not right up against the base of the trees, but underneath some of the shade, and they'll do okay, and they'll survive. So, from that sense, it's got some tolerance, but they don't really grow.

They don't come out of that grass stage and grow in height until they get a lot more light, and the below-ground competition falls off as well. So, that's why when you see it, the regeneration patches that you find in longleaf pine, they often look like a dome shape because you've got a gap opening in the canopy. The seedlings are established in that.

They grow the best. They grow the tallest in the middle, and the height kind of falls off as you get closer to the canopy trees at the edge of the gap. And so there's, from that standpoint, the growth, it is shade intolerant.

But for seedling survival, in a lot of cases, they do pretty well underneath at least moderate shade. Now, if you've got a really heavy closed canopy and everything shaded underneath, it's not going to do well in that situation.

[Greg Edge]

I think we're realizing more we have a number of those species that grew in sort of those open forest conditions that are adapted to partial shade during periods of their life and then will grow faster in full sun later on. It just makes it an interesting dynamic when you start thinking about the silviculture.

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, and it's, well, I was going to say it's very similar to a lot of the oak regeneration systems that they use when you get up into Missouri and those states. And so once we figured that out with longleaf pine, we started finding lots of similar characteristics around other species in other places.

[Greg Edge]

Steve, you already mentioned, and I think we have to go into this right away, is just a little bit about the reproductive biology. So you mentioned the grass stage. What is that and how does that work in longleaf?

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, it's interesting. I think there are a couple other species that have a grass stage. So the seed is dispersed out of the cones in the fall and they actually germinate in the fall.

A lot of the other southern pines, the seed overwinters as a seed, but in longleaf pine they germinate in the fall. And so once that seedling is established, then it doesn't grow in height typically for anywhere from two to as many as 20 years, depending, like we just talked about, with the light situation and other competition. So you'll have this plant sitting out there that looks like a bunch grass, unless you know what you're looking for.

And if you go out looking in the summertime when those bunch grasses are green like the longleaf pine, then they're hard to find.

[Greg Edge]

All looks the same.

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, but if you go out there in the wintertime when the grass is browned up, then they're much easier to find. But it's really interesting. They're building a root system.

What people have discovered with that, they're growing below ground. And a lot of that is the sites that they are found on typically and why they can survive in those areas. But they're interesting when they're in that grass stage.

Like I said, it just looks like a bunch grass sitting there. And if you look at the terminal bud on them, it's not a well-defined terminal bud. It's kind of a dome of buds, which is where the next year's needles come out.

And so if you look at them and you start to see a defined terminal bud in the middle of this bunch grass looking plant, you know that the next year it's going to start growing in height. And so what a lot of people talk about is the rocket stage or the bolting stage of the longleaf pine. And so when they come out of that grass stage, they tend to grow in height very rapidly.

So they'll go from this bunch grass looking thing and in two years they'll be 10 or 12 feet tall. That's why they call it the rocket stage or the bolt stage. And they grow rapidly in height and they don't do many, they don't invest much in branches at that stage.

So it's this tall, skinny, people call them a bottle brush or a Dr. Seuss tree or something like that, because it's just a tall, skinny sapling that grows up.

[Greg Edge]

What triggers that transition? What triggers them to do that bolting?

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, that's been studied some. I don't, really it just comes back to that competition. So if they've got enough root system built up to where they can support the above ground growth and there's more light available and less below ground competition, then that's when they tend to come out.

So maybe jumping ahead a bit, but when you think about the silviculture that you use, oftentimes, and this was a change in thinking from the early years, but you work at getting advanced regeneration of longleaf pine underneath the canopy and get those seedlings well established as grass stage seedlings. And then when you open the canopy up through a harvest, they get more light, there's less below ground competition, and they just shoot up in that rocket stage and jump up and start to, then you start to see them. Before that, it's hard to see them down in the grass.

[Brad Hutnik]

I'm curious, how long can they stay in that grass stage? Like, if you didn't do the disturbance in the overstory, is that just a year or two or does that go on for quite some time?

[Steve Jack]

Oh, it can be quite a long time, especially in natural stance. People have seen where they're monitoring the seedling population for well over 10 years and in some as much as almost 20 years where they're just hanging out. But at some point, they will succumb.

They don't hold on forever.

[Greg Edge]

Unless they get that light and that stimulation. 

[Steve Jack]

Right. Whether it's through a harvest or a natural disturbance of some sort.

[Greg Edge]

I didn't really realize, Brad, this is sounding a lot more like our oak silviculture than our northern pine silviculture is developing advanced regeneration under a partial canopy.

[Brad Hutnik]

Steve, when you were saying it, they were putting their resources into the roots. I'm like, we're going to have to rename this like Oakish Pine or something like that. Yeah, I was having the exact same thought.

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, well, that's what I said earlier. The more we found out about how the species behaves in response to either disturbance or our treatments, you know, colleagues that I know that work in the oak world, it's like, hey, we're dealing with the same kind of thing here.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, I can hear Pat Grose's voice in my head going, you know, don't take the top off until you have advanced regeneration.

[Steve Jack]

Yeah. Yeah, for me, it's Dan Day that I hear in my head.

[Greg Edge]

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Him too.

Yeah. I wake up at night hearing Dan Day's lecturing me.

[Brad Hutnik]

But, you know, it's interesting. Maybe it's related to the oak or maybe it's just because I don't know that much about longleaf. But the one thing I do know, and it was from, well, just life in general, but one time I visited a friend at Eglin Air Force Base, is that it really liked fire.

[Steve Jack]

That is true. 

[Brad Hutnik]

And it kind of makes sense with that grass stage. But I guess, you know, like fire can mean a lot of different things.

So it likes to get burned. But how frequently, what does fire look like in a longleaf system?

[Steve Jack]

If everything's going well, it's very frequent, but low intensity fires. And that's typically what you look for. It's often called the fire species, the fire forest, because it is adapted to fire.

That is the adaptation of the grass stage is that you can run fire across those grass stage seedlings and scorch every needle on that plant. And as long as that bud is still intact, it'll grow more needles and come right back. The time when you can kill longleaf pine with fire is when those new germinates, if they germinate in the fall and you burn the next February or March, they don't do so well.

If they're a well-established grass stage seedling, they do well. The other time that you can kill them is in that bolting stage when they're just getting their terminal bud up. If the bud is broken and you got what most of the time we call candling because it's a big, long, white shoot with no needles on it.

If you burn during that time, those shoots are not fire tolerant and you can kill it. And then that often kills the whole plant. So outside of those two things, which you can adjust by when you burn and paying attention, longleaf pine is the most fire tolerant of the southern pines, both as a seedling and as a mature tree, of course, with the thick bark and all of that.

And its needles help promote the fire because they have the right chemical makeup to burn well. So, yeah, it is. When we think about managing longleaf pine, it's use fire, use it often and just keep fire in the system.

That's the most important thing when managing longleaf pine.

[Greg Edge]

Do we know historically what that fire regime would have looked like in terms of like fire return intervals? You just said frequent low severity fire.

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, of course, it varies from location to location, but there's been a lot of work on that. And typically on the coastal plain, it's often every two to three years. Some places it's a little more frequent than that, one to two years.

If you get into the mountain longleaf pine, then it stretches a little bit. But if you don't want to go more than five years without a fire. So most of the time in these forests, most people think about a two to three year interval between fires, which means you're doing a lot of prescribed fire.

[Brad Hutnik]

So it sounds like it's kind of an interesting dynamic then. So the seedlings aren't going to be super tolerant, but then you have these really frequent fires. So is it kind of accumulating regeneration over time similar to an oak?

[Steve Jack]

That's the way it works if you're doing natural regeneration a lot of times, yes. The one thing that skipped over in the silvics is that the seed crops are very irregular in longleaf pine. So a species like a loblolly pine here in the south, pretty much every year it produces seed.

The seeds disperse widely. That's why you can find loblolly pine everywhere, even outside of where they're planting it. But longleaf pine, it's more like every six to ten years that you get a big seed crop.

And it varies across its range. The Forest Service for a lot of years has been going out and monitoring seed crops and making estimates for that. That started back with Bill Boyer a long time ago.

And so with irregular seed crops, when you see that the trees are producing some cones, then that's a year that you want to make sure that you've got some mineral seed bed available for that seed to fall on. And hopefully you would burn it before the seed falls so that you don't have to burn it the next year when you've got those little germinates out there. So that's all part of what the longleaf foresters think about is the timing of the fire relative to when you have seed produced.

And once those grass stage seedlings are established, then you're banking them, just like in the oak forest. And you can keep adding to that. And at the Jones Center, Ichauway is the name of the property, that was one of the things that had happened over a lot of years.

Was to keep capturing some seed every year, not worry about a bumper crop and getting it everywhere. But just if you've got a little area that's producing seed, then hopefully you'll catch that regeneration. You've got seedlings there, and then when you harvest, or in the case of the Jones Center in 2018, a hurricane went through there and knocked down a bunch of trees.

It's amazing how well all that, all those seedlings that have been basically stored there as advanced regeneration now are jumping up. And so different size trees, but there's still a lot of longleaf pine there. And that's true in a lot of other properties as well.

That's just a place I'm familiar with.

[Brad Hutnik]

I'm imagining with this fire, kind of that frequent fire, and just kind of in my mind, kind of thinking about it. It must be that that canopy must not be super tight then either, right? So they're a little shade tolerant, but it's maybe not like a, the stand must be pretty open, huh?

[Steve Jack]

They do tend to be more open, yes. A little bit lower densities. You can find them at very high densities.

If you look at a lot of the historical photographs of people in longleaf pine forests, those are the ones that everybody likes to show because the trees are very close together. They're very large, and there's not much light getting to the understory. But typically in natural forests with the fire and disturbances and lightning strikes taking out an individual tree, it's not as dense a canopy.

But the other part of that is the structure of the canopy in longleaf pine is different, and it allows more light to pass through the canopy, even at the same leaf areas. And again, there's research that shows that if you, instead of leaf area using basal area, but at the same basal area, there's much more light coming through a longleaf pine canopy than there is through slash pine or lobolly pine, just because of the way that the needles are arrayed within the individual crowns. So there can be a lot of leaf area there, but on longleaf pine, it tends to be like pom-poms at the end of a branch, rather than just all along a branch.

And so it's, the foliage is more densely packed, which allows more light to get through. And then it also tends to be at slightly lower densities than a lot of the other species.

[Greg Edge]

I'm imagining, too, with that fire regime, Steve, that the understory and the mid-story was fairly open in the historical context.

[Steve Jack]

Right, right. Yeah, that's, that is the thing, and that's what people look for, you know, in a well-managed longleaf pine forest. Yeah, so it's kind of a two-layer forest, and there's not much mid-story at all.

You'll see some. I mean, it's not completely open, but there's just not nearly as much of a mid-story. So you have the mature trees, which can be different ages, and then you have that seedling layer and a very diverse ground cover.

The botanists have done a lot of work looking at the ground cover, and it's one of the most diverse plant communities outside of the tropics. And so they've done studies laying down a square meter quadrat and counting the number of species and finding 40-some species in a square meter, different species. And so it's, you know, it is a very diverse ground cover.

So the fire helps promote that plant diversity, but also keeps the mid-story in check. And that's, that's the structure that people think about for a well-managed longleaf pine forest. And that's a lot of the things that people are interested in from an ecological or conservation standpoint are associated with that very open mid-story.

[Greg Edge]

So would they have considered those original stands even-aged or uneven-aged?

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, you know, that is a good question, and it could be either one. But typically with natural longleaf pine stands, we think of them as uneven-aged, multi-aged. But you've got cohorts, pockets of even-aged regeneration.

So earlier I mentioned those domes of regeneration that get established in gaps, and those grow up. And then another pocket of that, you know, a different cohort gets established somewhere close by. So as a whole, the forest may be multi-aged, uneven-aged.

But if you go into one small area, the trees may all be of the same age within a small amount. So, like, mostly people think about historically and naturally a multi-aged forest.

[Brad Hutnik]

And it's cool, because that, it sounds to me like if we were thinking about it in terms of, like, maybe the, that structure, it's not that dispersed regeneration throughout the entire thing, but those, that aggregated retention, which I think we see in other systems as well, but, but it is kind of cool just to kind of think about it. Like from my, the picture in my mind, I can kind of put two and two together a little bit with that.

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, it makes you think of the gap phase regeneration from what was in Borman and Likens and all that way long ago. And it is similar to that. And so when there is a very large seed crop, when there's a bumper seed crop in a, in a particular forest, you may have seedlings everywhere.

There'll just be a carpet of seedlings that germinate, but they don't survive and get established across the entire area. So, yeah, what you end up with over time is those pockets of regeneration in the gaps.

[Greg Edge]

This is why I like conversations about species I don't work with, because all of a sudden it's like, oh, yeah, there's a lot of similarities here between different systems. I mean, there's differences, but there's just a lot of patterns that you see over and over, like that multi-cohort in those, that kind of disturbance regime.

[Brad Hutnik]

You know, Greg, it makes me think, I think about this as a change from when I was younger, but, and I know we've talked about it, but maybe just not recently, but just how I don't think I quite understood the value of advanced regeneration as a part of the whole system. When I was starting out, it was like you did a, you harvested, you created conditions, you put seed on the ground, and then you had a new stand. In many situations, I feel like I'm always recovering and going, wait, we're getting stuff on the ground.

The stand is a little resilient. If something happens, now you get new regeneration coming through.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, I think that applies to a lot of systems like we talked about with oak and our pine systems too.

[Brad Hutnik]

I think northern hardwoods, you name it, I think a lot of them are really dependent upon advanced regeneration. Season seven of Silvicast is made possible thanks to sponsors like the Family Forest Carbon Program. The Family Forest Carbon Program pays landowners to improve the health of their land and increase the long-term value of their property.

The program equips landowners with resources and support to implement sustainable practices that help them reach their own goals for their woodlands, while also improving the health of their forests and our planet. To learn more about how you can access these benefits for our forests, visit familyforestcarbon.org.

[Greg Edge]

So Steve, I said earlier on, I think from a restoration standpoint, there's obviously been a lots of effort in longleaf pine, as you said, over the last 30 years. And you're probably further along in some lessons learned in silviculture than maybe we are as far as in our northern pine systems because kind of some of that natural regen work is quite new for us in those systems like red pine. So just kind of thinking about what is the current state of thinking around longleaf pine silviculture, for example, natural regeneration, what types of silvicultural systems would foresters be using and what would they prefer?

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, and, you know, it somewhat goes, of course, in silviculture, it depends on your objectives. The early research, which was largely done in the U.S. Forest Service by Tom Croker and Bill Boyer, they were looking at even-aged systems. Again, that goes back to the perceived shade intolerance, extreme shade intolerance of longleaf pine.

So they were looking at even-aged systems. And what they found was that the seed tree doesn't work. Again, the seeds don't disperse very far from the parent tree.

Only about whatever the tree height is, is the distance. So if you got just a few trees per acre, it's not going to work. But they did find that the shelterwood system worked very well.

So a shelterwood or going to an irregular shelterwood, if you're thinking about even-aged natural regeneration, those systems work very well with longleaf pine. And there's a lot of examples where that has been shown to work very well. But as people started to look at the historical forest more and figured out that it is more of a multi-age forest with the different cohorts, then they started thinking about what uneven-aged or multi-age silvicultural systems might work.

And there's been a lot of that kind of management that has been tried out. And there are various methods that people have done. At the Jones Center, we did an experiment where we had group selection and group selection with reserves versus a single tree selection kind of system and saw some differences in that.

But you can make those work. The thing with the group selections is you got to not make the openings too big that you don't have the fuels to carry a good fire through those openings because the things that you don't want to take over can do well in those openings, just like longleaf pine can. So, there at Ichauway, some of the other hardwood species would grow much faster than the longleaf pine in the group openings.

So, you can make those work in terms of single tree selection systems people have used. Bob Ferrer with Forest Service was a big proponent of the BDq method for longleaf pine. And you can find his work where he documents that.

There are other methods similar to that have been proposed. One that a lot of people have heard about, and it's much harder to quantify, is the Stoddard-Neel approach in longleaf pine. Herbert Stoddard, who of course was known for his quail management work and wildlife ecology, also started managing properties for their timber.

So, he did the forestry work on them and developed a system for individual tree selection. But it doesn't have the structural targets, makes it harder to describe than, say, the BDq approach. But Leon Neel learned from Mr. Stoddard and took over that. And I was fortunate enough to spend a lot of time with Leon. He was my mentor in learning about longleaf pine forests. And so, learning from him and what they looked at.

So, that is one that, if you read the longleaf pine literature, you'll start to see mention of the Stoddard-Neel approach. I don't want to go too far off in that.

[Brad Hutnik]

We're here for going too far on things. So, yeah, that's what we're about. 

[Greg Edge]

Brad goes too far a lot of times. Is it an irregular type of system?

Is that why it's hard to quantify?

[Steve Jack]

Yes, it is. It's more like, let's see, the Freethinning, anyway, that they did out in Idaho area. You don't have those quantitative targets.

You're not looking for a particular basal area or spacing or anything. It's kind of reading the forest as you go through. It's more towards the art side of silviculture.

And so, it became popular in the longleaf restoration world to talk about doing Stoddard-Neel. My viewpoint is a little bit different just because I spent so much time with Leon. And that system was developed starting in the late 1930s and carried on up into the 90s.

But the world is different. The forests are different. No one is doing it exactly like those two did it.

So, that's my personal soapbox of just saying, well, don't call it the Stoddard-Neel approach. You can call it a modification of it or something. But it is one way of managing the forest, thinking more about the ecological characteristics than the pure timber output that you get from the forest.

And so, that's what it concentrates on. So, walking around with Leon, we're worried about, well, that tree's got a defect on the top, but what a great nesting site that would be for hawks or whatever. And look at this great ground cover that we got here.

We don't need a skidder to come through here and mess that up. And, of course, you're looking at all the trees too. I'm not saying that you're not.

But those other things are coming in there as well. So, to kind of circle back on that, there have been those multi-age approaches where people have done a lot of management of longleaf pine forests. People are working on trying to characterize those better for the forest itself.

But it's been a long and varied road in that. And there's not one particular method that everybody uses.

[Brad Hutnik]

I'm really curious. You know, a lot of times, I don't know, we have like fashions. And one thing that we've – I think it's actually cool, and I'm kind of just curious to see if you guys have talked about it.

You mentioned gaps and groups. But have you talked about expansion of gaps or groups?

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, and we played around with some of that through the operational harvest that we were doing there at H-Way. So, if there's a natural gap – and that was actually part of what I learned from Leon. It's like, well, here's a natural gap.

Let's take out a few trees around the edge of this. That's going to open up that gap. And any regeneration that's out there will then do better, have more light, and be able to do it.

So, the whole idea that we researched a lot more in the last 20 years about the groups and gaps and skips and all of that. We did look at doing some of that in Longleaf Pine, and some people have implemented some of that, working with the researchers who've done a lot of the work on that. So, yes, that has been tried.

I won't say that operationally it's the most prevalent sort of thing, but it has been tried, and it does fit with the system. So, that may be something that will get more attention in the future as things move forward.

[Greg Edge]

It seems like from a restoration standpoint and an ecological standpoint that a lot of the irregular shelterwood techniques would fit with this species. Is that something you've seen people use?

[Steve Jack]

Yes, that has been used. And especially a lot of the ecological value of the natural Longleaf Pine forest is having larger mature trees. So, an irregular shelterwood where you maintain some of that overstory for much longer than you would with the shelterwood system has been tried and has been successful.

Like any irregular shelterwood, if you decide to go in and get those over the overwood trees at a later time, then you have to maneuver around the regeneration that you've established. But it has been done, and it has been done successfully. What is probably people are more interested in in the south is where they have a different species in the canopy, and they want Longleaf Pine.

And so, rather than clear-cut it and plant Longleaf Pine, try to manage the overstory, reduce the overstory of the other species under-plant Longleaf Pine, keep the fire in there. And over time, the idea is that you would have what your planted Longleaf Pine grow up, produce seed, and get regeneration, and slowly convert the stand back to more Longleaf. Right.

Whether it's pure Longleaf, probably not, but at least more than 50% of the stocking would be Longleaf, and then you can call it. And there's been a lot of work looking at that. There's some difficulties in that just because of the slow growth of the Longleaf Pine seedlings and some of that, and especially under Lobolly Pine, which is such a prolific seeder, it's hard to keep the Lobolly regeneration down.

[Brad Hutnik]

Would natural stands have had a lot of species diversity for trees, or would it have been mostly, like, because you could see, like, if you had these mixes, then, yeah, you would have all those other issues associated with, say, regeneration kind of stuff. But I'm curious. I have no idea.

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, no, it's both. There were historically a lot of areas that were pretty pure Longleaf Pine. That's because of the fire history and things like that, the overstory was pretty much Longleaf Pine.

And the remnant old growth places that still exist, which are very few, it's dominated by Longleaf Pine. So those did exist. But there are other places where it was a mix.

So you might have, depending on where you're at within the range, it might be Longleaf and Slash Pine when you get down into the flatwoods of North Florida. Or if you get up closer to the Piedmont areas, it might be Longleaf and Lobolly Pine. In some other areas, it might be Longleaf and Shortleaf Pine.

So it was found with the other species. And so it was there in different densities, different levels, depending on how that site developed, how that stand developed. And that's one of the things restoration-wise now, is people will go to a stand that's obviously not old growth, but has come up and there's a mixture of overstory pine species.

And so that's part of the selection that you do. Whatever silvicultural system you're using, it's like we're going to leave the Longleaf Pine and we're going to harvest this other pine out of the canopy. And again, through multiple entries, then you shift the dominance to Longleaf Pine.

And there's, from a restoration standpoint, there's a lot more of that to work with. And there are pure, almost pure Longleaf Pine canopies. And so that's, from a restoration standpoint, that's the way people are approaching those situations.

[Greg Edge]

Steve, does prescribed fire a necessary component of all of these silvicultural systems? Or can you develop this advanced regeneration of Longleaf without fire?

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, that's a good question. If I'm being hardcore, I'm going to say no, that you have to have fire. You know, it is the fire forest.

And that's the way it's evolved to regenerate and all. But there's been some work. We did a little bit at the Jones Center and other places have done it.

So if you're interested in controlling that mid-story and some of the competition in the understory, whether it's with mechanical or chemical means, you can do that. And the Longleaf regeneration doesn't know how it got there. It just knows there's not much competition.

And it can do, okay, so you can get that regeneration established. What you find when you do that, though, is the other components that we think about with a Longleaf forest, the diverse ground cover, things like that, that's what you lose. So you can get Longleaf seedlings and regeneration going, but you lose some of those other components, which are very important for the overall ecological and conservation benefits.

They don't do as well without the fire.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, I was thinking when you talked about Shelterwood method, that maybe somebody would substitute mechanical scarification to get mineral seed bed or, as you said, some other types of intermediate treatments to control that competition.

[Steve Jack]

And it does work, yes. It's interesting in a place like Ichauway, which was managed for coil for decades, still is, they used to do the checkerboarding for coil hunting, which means they ran a disk through the woods and divided up the areas that made burning smaller patches at a time so that the coil had a place to go hide. But what you find is you get these long, narrow, linear regeneration patches, you know, 20-foot tall saplings of Longleaf pine, just thick, you know, linear orientation.

And at first you'd say, well, how in the heck did that happen? Then you realize, oh, they had a good seed crop after they ran the disk through here.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah.

[Steve Jack]

And now you get a nice good patch of Longleaf regeneration. So yes, those means do work. And there are times when people have used that to get more of the regeneration established.

It doesn't, you can still use fire even if you do that, if you do that scarification of the soil. And the Longleaf does germinate very well in those situations. Old logging decks are, if you've got a good seed crop after one, that's a good place to get a lot of Longleaf regeneration.

[Brad Hutnik]

I'm curious, is there very much, like when I picture southern pine management, I think of a lot of artificial regeneration. Is there a lot of artificial regeneration with Longleaf?

[Steve Jack]

In recent years, there has been a lot, a whole lot of it. And in fact, this goes back to that there is the Longleaf Restoration Initiative, the America's Longleaf Restoration Initiative, ALRI. It started in, I think, 2009.

And so they were trying to increase the amount of Longleaf pine forests on the landscape from that three percent, three or four percent that was left to much higher numbers. And so most of that work that's been done in the last 15 years or so, 15, 16 years, honestly has been planting Longleaf pine seedlings. So going in to cut over forest areas, old fields, there's been a lot of government programs, incentive programs that have helped that along.

And other programs, NIFWIF has a Longleaf program where they fund a lot of restoration across the Longleaf range. So it's interesting. The acreage of Longleaf pine forest has increased in the time that that restoration initiative has been going on.

But most of that is through the establishment of Longleaf pine plantations. And we've actually lost some of the natural forests that were there at the start of the initiative, but we're gaining more through planting. So then, in terms of silviculture, the question becomes, okay, we can grow Longleaf pine plantations.

They've learned a lot about producing seedlings. It's pretty much all containerized seedlings that are planted these days. The commercial growers do a good job of producing good seedlings.

But as you have that plantation, we still look at burning it, even though it's a young plantation of Longleaf pine, after a couple of years, you still run fire through it and keep that up. There are two things. Eventually, a plantation of the densities that are usually planted, you end up with a closed canopy, which is not like those natural systems.

So the ground cover, any ground cover that might have been there, you tend to at least suppress, if not lose. But then, longer term, how do you go from that plantation structure to that natural forest structure that everybody thinks about is Longleaf pine forest? And so the Jones Center has been doing work on that for a while and continues to do work on that.

There are other places that are looking at that as well. How do you transition from a Longleaf pine plantation when you do a first stinting at 18 or 20 years old? How do you start moving it to get those characteristics that you think about with the natural Longleaf pine forest?

And so that is a big area that people are looking at. It's both how do you manage the trees and the canopy? When does natural regeneration start?

But also, in most cases, reintroducing that ground cover community that you have, all those native plants.

[Greg Edge]

Right, how do you get that back?

[Steve Jack]

And that's actually much more difficult than the trees. So those are both big areas of research.

[Greg Edge]

That's interesting. I mean, we're having similar discussions in the north with, say, red pine. How would you move our plantations, which are our dominant amount of red pine, more into a natural northern pine system?

So kind of having those same sort of silvicultural discussions.

[Brad Hutnik]

I'm just trying to picture what planting grass stage seedlings looks like. Like, you can't plant them too deep, I mean, in some ways, right? Like, as long as that bud is right at the ground level.

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, and there's been a lot of work on that. Planting what they call planting them shallow. So a little bit of the plug is actually sticking up above ground because you don't want any dirt coming back in and burying that bud.

If the bud gets buried, they don't do very well. So, yeah. And at one time, there was a lot of interest in machine planting them because they're in plugs and you can do that.

But it's harder to control the depth. And you've got to have pretty clean conditions to get that depth right. In other words, if you're in a cutover site and the guy in the planter is bouncing around and the planter is going up and down, it's hard to control that depth.

So it works really well in all agricultural fields, not so well in cutover sites. So I would say the majority now are hand planted with those plugs.

[Brad Hutnik]

And it's all containerized too?

[Steve Jack]

Pretty much. It's hard to find bare root longleaf pine seedlings anymore. There used to be some.

And I'm sure there are still some out there. But the commercial growers pretty much are all containerized.

[Greg Edge]

Steve, before we run out of time, there's a couple of questions I want to get to because I'm really curious about this. And one is about this use of prescribed fire with this species, which is obviously important. And then also the need to restore longleaf back across that landscape.

I'm just wondering sort of what the culture is around the use of prescribed fire with the landowners that are there, because that's one of our big challenges here in the north is private landowners don't feel comfortable using fire for silvicultural purposes. And so is there more burning in that region? And how do landowners view that?

[Steve Jack]

There is definitely more burning in the south than in other parts of the country. And the prescribed fire councils in the national organization, I just lost the name of it, but you can look at that. They put out maps of how many acres are burned in states.

In Georgia, Florida, especially when you classify it as forestry burning, all of those states in that range of longleaf pine have some of the highest number of acres burned per year or percentage of acres burned per year. Now you can look at some areas, say in Oklahoma, they do a lot of burning, but it's a lot of grassland burning, not forest burning. So yes, there is a culture of fire that hung on.

The interesting story is that in the early 20th century, of course, the U.S. Forest Service was actively trying to keep forest fires, prescribed fire included out, and they had their Dixie Crusaders who went across the south and talked about the evils of fire. And in a lot of the areas of the south, though, there were people that grew up with fire that knew the benefits of fire. And then you had people like Herbert Stoddard who were well-known proponents of fire that just kind of ignored that.

So the fire culture remained in the south. So in general, prescribed fire is understood and seen as something good by the people in this part of the country. Now like anywhere, that changes as you get people moving out of the cities, to buy their 10-acre homestead or whatever.

That takes some education. But oftentimes when they see the benefits and what the forest looks like and the fact that you're reducing fuel, so if a wildfire comes through, you're less likely to have everything on your property burn up. I mean, it's an easier sell just because of the overall culture.

So that has been in place historically, and it just continues on. And there's been a lot written about the culture of fire in the south. So it is very different than the part of the country where y'all are at.

And it is a benefit since a lot of the species we work with acquire that fire.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, yeah. That's a big benefit to be able to apply it more.

[Brad Hutnik]

If you have it and you didn't lose it, it's a good thing, as opposed to, I'm not sure we ever really had it here. Or we had it to a degree, but we sure didn't hold on to it if we did. 

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, yeah.

[Brad Hutnik]

One thing that we talked about before our conversation was some work that you've done with the Adaptive Silviculture for Climate Change Project, and that was previously, but you had a paper in Journal of Forestry that kind of talked about longleaf in that context. Have there been any early takeaways from that or anything that you found really interesting?

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, I'll preface my comments. I was there and helped get that project established at the Jones Center. Even before I left there, I wasn't the lead on that anymore.

And now it's Josh Pulek who's taken that over, and Josh is continuing on the analysis. But the early results from that, this is my take, when we set up those treatments for resilience, resistance, adaptation that you have in that network, we were really focused on the changing climate being warmer and drier for at least, if not, at least periods of more drought. Some models show that the annual rainfall may be the same, but it's much less evenly dispersed.

So water seemed to be the biggest thing. And so a lot of the treatments were set up based upon water use and being more drought tolerant, heat tolerant, that sort of thing. What has come out of that is that some of the other factors may be as important as those adaptations that we were looking at for the silvicultural adaptations.

One being wind. I mentioned earlier that a hurricane came through Ichauway in 2018 and blew down a lot of trees, including where those ASCA experiment plots were. And finding that some of the species that were left behind for those other, you know, the resilience, resistance kinds of treatments, they responded differently to wind disturbance.

And so you've got to think about that, because the changes are not just in temperature or rainfall. It's more frequent storms and all of those sorts of things. But if you just look at adaptations for the species itself, longleaf pine could benefit from some of the predicted changes.

I actually did a webinar probably years ago now on that topic, looking at longleaf pine. And some of the models have longleaf pine getting as far north as Long Island in New York under the changed climate, which is hard to think about. And I don't know that it's really going to happen.

But, you know, it will respond well, because it tends to be drought hardy as adaptations to curtail its water use and that sort of thing. So if you look just at those factors, it could do really well. It is adapted to some of the climate changes and may expand its range.

But then if you throw in some of the other things like the windstorm occurrence and what effect that might have, or just if we're in a hotter, drier climate, does that reduce the number of days we've got for prescribed fire? And then how do we keep up the prescribed fire that we've been talking about all through this conversation if you don't have the good burning conditions? So those are the things that are less well understood.

But from a first look, it seems like longleaf pine might be one of the winners out of some of that.

[Greg Edge]

And I wanted to note on that paper, I saw that our colleague in Minnesota, Marcella, is on that. So I was like, oh, geez. 

[Brad Hutnik]

She's everywhere.

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, Marcella. She's another one that I've known for a long, long time. But Marcella started working with Josh through the Ask Network.

And they started collaborating quite a bit because of that first introduction. And so Marcella's branched out looking at longleaf pine in Georgia out of Minnesota.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, very cool. Way to go, Marcella. Well, Steve, that's like really, you know, we can't do justice to 30 years worth of research, but that's a really good rundown on a lot of different components.

And so really appreciate this conversation to better understand that species and kind of what's going on. I'm glad to see, like, there are collaborations, like with Marcella and folks working in the south, because as I said in the beginning, I think we have a lot to learn silviculturally that we can share across regions. So these conversations are really always important for me.

[Steve Jack]

Yeah, no, I agree. There is a lot we can learn from each other. And we need to do more of that.

We all get comfortable in our little work areas. Just one thing, one last comment is that we talked a lot about the silvics and how the species grows. The new effort that's been headed by the U.S. Forest Service to produce a new silvics manual for North America. I'm sure you all are aware of that. But the chapter on longleaf pine has been published now. It's all a digital manual this time around.

And so John Willis was the lead author on the chapter on longleaf pine, and that's been published within the last month or two. And so if someone really wants to learn more about it, there's a lot more detail and can figure out all the places that I misspoke in what I said today from looking through that.

[Greg Edge]

And I think I saw that, and it's, correct me if I'm wrong, but it is available on the Silvics of North America website, that new chapter, I believe. 

[Steve Jack]

Correct, yes. I think I sent that link as part of the background information.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah, we'll put that in the show notes.

[Greg Edge]

Yep, for sure. Thanks, Steve, and very good to meet you and really great conversation. So thank you very much.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah, we really appreciate it.

[Steve Jack]

Well, you're welcome, and thank you for the opportunity to have this conversation. It's been fun.

[Brad Hutnik]

We're going to start planting them next year, right, Greg?

[Greg Edge]

Yeah, I mean, hey, future adapted, why not southern Wisconsin?

[Steve Jack]

There you go, assisted migration.

[Greg Edge]

Yeah. We didn't put that in our ask site, but maybe. Take care, Steve.

[Steve Jack]

Yep. All right, thank you. Bye.

[Brad Hutnik]

Greg, that was a really good conversation. You know, it really struck home to me, the idea that we learn, you know, we expand that net, we get out of our comfort zone, like you mentioned, and it really does kind of like you do kind of see some new things out there.

[Greg Edge]

I know you were quite skeptical when I said, let's do an episode on Longleaf Pine, but I think it's very interesting.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah, you know, I'm not going to be managing Longleaf, but I like the idea of just thinking about how they're applying the systems and making us think about that stuff. I think that's actually like really fascinating, so I kind of appreciate going behind why people, what they're doing, and learn more about why they're doing it, which is really cool.

[Greg Edge]

And as we said to Steve, it's just we learn a lot when we share ideas across regions, so I really appreciate those conversations.

[Brad Hutnik]

Yeah. So, actually, I hope everyone else got as much out of that as I did. I thought it was really good.

Well, thanks for listening to today's episode of Silvicast. If you have ideas for future episodes or a question for the Dropbox, please let us know. You can reach us at UW-Stevens Point's Wisconsin Forestry Center by emailing wfc at uwsp.edu. Feel free to include a sound file of your question or a comment, if you like, and send any comments you want. Anything in the world, we read them all, right, Greg? 

[Greg Edge]

I wouldn't go that far. 

[Brad Hutnik]

We read them all.

Well, we won't maybe read them on the air, but we read them all. Yes.

[Greg Edge]

 Yes, that's true.

[Brad Hutnik]

And always remember, we learn best when we wrestle with questions, so please keep them coming.

[Greg Edge]

And take care, everyone. And as always, thanks to our team, Susan Barrett, our executive producer, Joe Rogers, editor and IT Jedi Master, theme music by Paul Frater, and, of course, UW-Stevens Point's Wisconsin Forestry Center.