Highlights from our research in 2024
At the Southern Research Station, our top research priorities—fire, markets, water, forest health, and forest restoration—are all designed to ensure the sustainability of southern forests. Forests in the South are facing various changes and threats from climate change, increasing wildfire risk, shifting land use, expanding wildland-urban interface, shifting market demands for forest products, more frequent droughts, and various pests and diseases.
In 2024, our researchers published hundreds of papers aiming to understand southern forest ecosystems and address these threats. We’ve rounded up some important projects of the year to showcase this science and the benefits for southern forest ecosystems, mangers, and landowners.
The Chimney Tops fire destroyed lives and homes in Gatlinburg, Tennessee during the unusually active wildfire season in the Southern Appalachians in fall of 2016. Much of the damage in Gatlinburg occurred in wildland-urban interface areas like the scene shown here.
Wildfire and prescribed fire
In 2024, our research focused on developing and delivering new tools for modeling fire risk and fire effects socioeconomic vulnerability to fire, and risks to forest resources like watersheds. New maps, models, and tools can help to inform the allocation of effective management practices like prescribed burning and other fuel reduction efforts.
Biochar is a promising forest product that can be used as a soil amendment to remove heavy metals, sequester carbon, and more. It can be made from small-diameter trees that often have few other markets.
Forest products and markets
The Southeast produces more than half of the nation’s wood products. Projects advancing the science of regional forest products and markets include economic analyses of timber markets, impacts of markets on forest carbon storage, and biochar as an alternative market for small-diameter trees to offset the decline of the paper and pulpwood markets.
Forest restoration
Forest restoration can mean many things, depending on the site history or management goals, but it often involves transforming agricultural land back into forests or restoring tree species and ecosystems that have been damaged due to disturbance, disease, or ecosystem changes. Restoring forests can increase the resilience of our region’s natural resources for generations to come.
Future Forests: Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change explores how different forest ecosystems around the world are affected by climate change and how these forests, in turn, influence climate patterns.
Forest health and sustainability
This broad category of research addresses emerging threats and changes to the future of southern forests, such as climate change, pests, disease, and more. Some of the biggest projects of the year focused on tree blights, the future of old-growth forests, urban forestry, and understanding how rising temperatures and changing precipitation patterns will affect forest ecosystems and resources in the future. By understanding what to expect in future decades, landowners and forest managers can adjust their management strategies to better prepare for these changes and protect forest resources like timber and clean water.
Prescribed burn at Lake Maumelle, AR. The lake is a critical water source for Central Arkansas Water, which provides drinking water to more than 450,000 people. CAW manages forests with prescribed fire and thinning to reduce total organic carbon loads to the reservoir and to make their forests more resilient to drought, pests, and disease.
Water resources
More than 150 million people in the U.S. rely on forest lands for at least some of their water supply. Land use and climate change are making both droughts and floods more common, putting water supply, water quality, and water-related infrastructure at risk. SRS research focuses on understanding and addressing these risks to protect the South’s clean, plentiful water supply.