Abstract
In the southern and central Appalachian Mountains, dendroecological techniques conducted on fire-scarred trees in the yellow pine and mixed pine-hardwood forests of the Appalachian Mountains have shown that widespread fires burned about once every 7 years (range from 5 to 13 years) from the mid-1700s until 1925–1945 when a policy of widespread fire suppression was introduced and human-ignited fires were greatly reduced. This recent absence of fire has contributed to major changes in tree establishment rates, structural changes in forest stands, and changes in species composition. Major pulses of establishment in the first half of the twentieth century feature tree species that are shade-tolerant and fire-intolerant, replacing species adapted to repeated fires. Southern pine beetles have also dramatically reduced the abundance of yellow pines in xeric upland forests in recent decades. Yellow pines soon may be lost as a major component of Appalachian pine-oak forests as the forest floor develops a thick litter layer covered by ericaceous shrubs that were historically controlled by fire, especially on dry, low quality sites such as ridgetops and south- and southwest-facing slopes. Efforts to restore these pine/mixed hardwood ecosystems by reintroducing fires may be ineffective as land management agencies face forests best characterized as hybrid landscapes where effects of fire are largely unknown.
Fire happens almost everyday throughout the year, in some part or other, by Indians for the purpose of rousing game, as also by the lightning.
(William Bartram 1793)
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Acknowledgements
This summary on fires in the southern Appalachians would not have been possible without the constant professional companionship of my colleague, Dr. Charles Lafon of Texas A&M University, who provided the initial push to conduct this research. We both benefitted from some outstanding graduate students who participated in this research over the last 15 years: Georgina DeWeese, Serena Aldrich, Lisa LaForest, Will Flatley, Jennifer Flatley, Ian Feathers, Michael Armbrister, Justin Hart, and Alex Dye. I acknowledge Elaine Kennedy Sutherland of the USDA Forest Service for initiating tree-ring based fire history research in the Appalachians in 1993. I thank Mark Harmon of Oregon State University, Beverly Collins of Western Carolina University, Cathryn Greenberg of the USDA Forest Service, and an anonymous reviewer who provided excellent suggestions for improving drafts of this manuscript.
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Grissino-Mayer, H.D. (2016). Fire as a Once-Dominant Disturbance Process in the Yellow Pine and Mixed Pine-Hardwood Forests of the Appalachian Mountains. In: Greenberg, C., Collins, B. (eds) Natural Disturbances and Historic Range of Variation. Managing Forest Ecosystems, vol 32. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21527-3_6
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