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Don't forget to speak for the trees...
"The land of the longleaf pine is a land of great beauty... swaggering over the Coastal Plain from southeastern Virginia to eastern Texas...Yet little is left of the longleaf pine ecosystem today: only 1.4% of the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plains still support longleaf, compared to 60% in presettlement times. By 1996 only 2.95 million acres of longleaf remained out of the original 92 million acres ... Almost all of the old-growth forest is gone ... By any measure, longleaf's decline of nearly 98% is among the most severe of any ecosystem on earth. It dwarf's the Amazon rain forest's losses of somewhere between 13% and 25%. It is comparable to or exceeds the decline in the North American tallgrass prairie, the coastal forest of Brazil, and the dry forests of the Pacific Coast of Central America."
-from Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest by Lawrence S. Earley
See what the U.S. Forest Service is doing to restore this amazing ecosystem:
Restoring Longleaf Pine
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