Prescribed burning symposium

Abstract

The custom of annual burning of the woods from Colonial times onward is a subject of more interest, perhaps, to ecologists and social scientists than it is to foresters. The important point to us is that it had become a well-settled folkway by the time large-scale lumbering began in the southern pineries about 1890. Before this lumbering began, the light annual fires brought fresh green grass in the early spring and surely did little harm to the stands of the old-growth longleaf pine. Similarly, raking and burning in the turpentine woods did little harm and did save the faces from being burned by wildfires. However, when large-scale harvesting began, the annual fires no longer burned old-growth timber but cutover lands; and not even longleaf pine seedlings, and certainly not slash or loblolly pine seedlings can survive fire in their first year of life. Here was a significant change in a situation that had not changed much in a century. Fires killed seedlings on cutover land, and the areas of cutover land grew larger each year.

Citation

USDA Forest Service Southeastern Forest Experiment Station 1971. Prescribed burning symposium. Prescribed Burning symposium proceedings. 160 pp. Asheville, N.C.: Southeastern Forest Experiment Station