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The Ecology and Management of
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The longleaf pine resource declined steadily from the advent of European settlement until today, with little or no attention to or concern for that decline until the middle 1990’s. Faced with approximately 96% of the original longleaf forest lost, a small group of natural resource professionals and forest landowners coalesced to begin a modest grassroots effort to at least halt the decline, with some hope of reversing that trend. The Longleaf Alliance was born out of that group in 1995 and has galvanized the entire region and made longleaf a national priority forest ecosystem in the interim. From those fledgling beginnings, the Alliance has emerged as the regional leader in “all things longleaf”, a success based on a few guiding principles. With about 93% of the forestland in the longleaf range in private ownership, the Alliance recognized that meaningful restoration would necessarily incorporate many of those private lands into the effort. Further, we realized that to make the case for longleaf, we had to make a reasonable economic argument to complement the strong ecological argument to appeal to private landowners. We believed then and now that it was essential that we be “honest brokers” of information; that we present longleaf as an option, not a mandate; and that we treat every landowner with the same attention and respect. Using longleaf’s ties to the region’s history and culture gave us a hook that appealed to a wide range of audiences and helped build support even among those who were removed from the land. The group has remained small and focused, resisting opportunities to broaden our mission, and allowing us to concentrate all of our efforts on longleaf restoration.
longleaf pine, Atlantic white cedar, restoration, forest landowner