The Regions Forests
Biotic factors influencing the forest involve animals insects, birds, mammals, etc. , plants fungi, competing vegetation, etc. , and, of course, the trees themselves. In this book, trees are our principal concern, though other biotic components play significant roles in the development of forests. More than 60 forest-cover types have been recognized by the Society of American Foresters as occurring in the South. These are generally grouped into nine classes. The oak-hickory-pine type, the most...
Disruptions To The Coastal Plain
The Mississippi Delta A physiographic feature that breaks into the general pattern of the Gulf Coastal Plain is the lower alluvial valley of the Mississippi River, called the Delta locally and in forestry literature. It interrupts the prevailing east-west orientation of the Coastal Plain with a north-south strip of alluvial soils bearing distinctive bottomland hardwood forests. Pioneering settlers seemed to have had an understanding of world geography, especially the similarity of the lower...
The Highlands
Physiography Moving from east to west, upon leaving the Piedmont province one encounters the Blue Ridge and the Ridge and Valley provinces, and the Appalachian plateaus. The Blue Ridge Mountains, a belt 5 to 80 miles wide, extends from beyond the northern extremity of the southern Appalachians in Virginia southward to Georgia. This is the province through which passes the Appalachian Trail, the uninterrupted footpath from Maine's Mt. Katahdin to Springer Mountain in Georgia.12 This is also the...