The Shortleaf Pine-Oak-Hickory Ecosystem

In this post, I’ll begin a discussion of some of the salient features of the shortleaf pine-oak-hickory plant community, the foundation of the ecosystem that I am in the process of restoring. It’s a big project in which I’ve been involved for more than a decade.
 
This ecosystem was the dominant plant community of the Upper West Gulf Coastal Plain Ecoregion, encompassing northwest Louisiana, southwest Arkansas, northeast Texas and southeast Oklahoma.

The Upper West Gulf Coastal Plain Ecoregion(#40) is an ecoregion of gentle rolling hills of mixed pine and hardwood forests.

Take a look at the map above to see a few of the many ecoregions described in North America. Each is unique, based on a combination of factors such as climate, rainfall, topography, soils, geology, hydrology, flora, fauna, etc. The UWGCP Ecoregion is one of gentle rolling hills of mixed pines and hardwoods. Located on the hilltops and upper slopes, it was actually a fire-sustained open woodland instead of a shady forest and it allowed enough sunlight in to have a tallgrass prairie ground cover, a “prairie ground cover under trees.”
 
The two additional forest types are true forests (oldgrowth shady “cathedral-like”) located down slope along the draws and in the bottomlands. My own restoration on Wafer Creek Ranch, where I live, is located in northwest Louisiana near Ruston.  
 
The forest of the draws of the lower slopes of the hills is called the Mixed Hardwood-Loblolly Pine Forest community, and the forest of the bottomland flood plain is the Small Stream Forest community. The forest structure of these two communities is quite different from that of the woodland of the upper slopes and hilltops.

In my next post, I’ll describe the overstory (the trees) of the Shortleaf-Pine-oak-hickory woodland. This is gonna be fun.

Shortleaf pine-oak-hickory overstory and tallgrass prairie ground cover (in restoration).

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Conservationist and retired medical doctor (pathology), Johnny Armstrong and his wife Karen and Opal (k-nine) live within a Nature Conservancy protected old-growth forest and woodland near Ruston, Louisiana. Shadowshine is his first novel.