Fall 2005

Loss of Interior Forest in the Southeast Tied to Economic Development

In an article published fall 2004 in the journal Ecology and Society, Southern Research Station (SRS) researchers David Wear, John Pye, and Kurt Riitters provided a visual forecast of the effects of economic growth on interior forest habitat in the Southeast.

“Almost 90 percent of the land in the Southeastern United States is privately owned,” says Wear, project leader of the SRS Economics of Forest Protection and Management unit in Research Triangle Park, NC. “This means that major land use changes are being shaped by hundreds of thousands of individual decisions. We project that continuing urbanization and low-density residential development over the next decades could have a profound impact on the forest ecosystems in the Southeast.”

Many of the species that thrive in interior forest habitats cannot live in forest edge habitats. “Maintaining the species diversity of a forest means having suitable proportions of edge and interior habitat,” says Riiters, deputy program manager for the SRS Forest Health Monitoring unit in Research Triangle Park, NC. “As development proceeds, edge habitat becomes more plentiful and interior habitat more scarce. For this study, we focused on interior forest as an indicator of available habitat for species that tend to decline when forests become too fragmented.”(...continued...)