Abstract
Over the past two decades, forests in the southeastern United States have undergone dramatic changes as the result of urban sprawl and conversion to intensively managed pine plantations. The Cumberland Plateau, an important ecoregion in the southeastern United States, contains some of the largest remaining tracts of privately owned, native hardwood forest in North America. These ecologically important forests have been undergoing increasingly rapid rates of hardwood-to-pine conversion, much of which has gone undetected by large-scale statewide inventories. Forest conversion in Tennessee's southern Cumberland Plateau provides a case study highlighting the need for interdisciplinary and spatially explicit assessments of the impact and drivers of land-use change at smaller scales. Aerial and satellite imagery were used to create computer-generated maps of land use and forest cover for a 243 000 ha study area within a seven-county region of the southern Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee to track and document patterns of forest change and conversion between 1981 and 2000. The ecological impact of forest harvesting and hardwood-to-pine conversion was evaluated by (i) monitoring aquatic macroinvertebrate diversity, (ii) tracking breeding-bird populations, and (iii) comparing calcium (Ca) stores and cycling in a chronosequence of hardwood to first- and second-rotation loblolly pine (
*Corresponding author address: Deborah A. McGrath, Dept. of Biology, University of the South, 735 University Ave., Sewanee, TN 37383. dmcgrath@sewanee.edu
This article included in Land Use and Ecosystems special collection.
