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Abstract
Between 1962 and 1986 the use of hardwoods in the South increased from 1,715 to 2,940 million cubic feet. The increase, almost all from private lands, was primarily used for fuel (38%) and for the manufacture of pulp, paper and paperboard. This resource, much of which has been obtained from wetlands, is available from a shrinking land base. According to Dahl (1990), the southern wetland forest base shrunk from 112 million acres in 1780 to 57 million acres in 1980. Of the 1980 total, 42 million acres were in private ownership. That ownership class was extremely vulnerable to conversion from forest to field in the 1970s and 1980s when the price of agricultural crops (soybeans and corn) reached an all-time high. The reduction in acreage of wetlands from 1980 to 1987 on non-federal lands was from 42 to 29 million acres. Despite these startling figures, evidence shows that the bottomland hardwood resource was at a lower ebb during the half century following the Civil War than it is today
Citation
USDA Forest Service Southern Experiment Station 1994. Abstract: Workshop on Harvesting Impacts on Bottomland Hardwood Forest Ecosystems. Gen. Tech. Rep. SO-103. New Orleans, LA: U.S. Dept of Agriculture, Forest Service, Southern Forest Experiment Station. 23 p.
