Greenwood Plantation in the Red Hills region of southwest
Georgia includes a rare one-thousand-acre stand of old-growth
longleaf pine woodlands, a remnant of an ecosystem that once
covered close to ninety million acres across the Southeast. The
Art of Managing Longleaf documents the sometimes controversial
management system that not only has protected Greenwood's "Big
Woods" but also has been practiced on a substantial acreage of the
remnant longleaf pine woodlands in the Red Hills and other parts of
the Coastal Plain. Often described as an art informed by science,
the Stoddard-Neel Approach combines frequent prescribed burning,
highly selective logging, a commitment to a particular woodland
aesthetic, intimate knowledge of the ecosystem and its processes,
and other strategies to manage the longleaf pine ecosystem in a
sustainable way.
The namesakes of this method are Herbert Stoddard (who developed
it) and his colleague and successor, Leon Neel (who has refined
it). In addition to presenting a detailed, illustrated outline of
the Stoddard-Neel Approach, the book-based on an extensive oral
history project undertaken by Paul S. Sutter and Albert G. Way,
with Neel as its major subject-discusses Neel's deep familial and
cultural roots in the Red Hills; his years of work with Stoddard;
and the formation and early years of the Tall Timbers Research
Station, which Stoddard and Neel helped found in the pinelands near
Tallahassee, Florida, in 1958. In their introduction, environmental
historians Sutter and Way provide an overview of the longleaf
ecosystem's natural and human history, and in his afterword, forest
ecologist Jerry F. Franklin affirms the value of the Stoddard-Neel
Approach.
eISBN: 978-0-8203-4075-3
Subjects: Environmental Science, Technology
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