Earley 2
highest sea level:


lowest sea level:

1. It must support the growth of specific types of water loving plants.
2. The soil must be of a moisture-filled (hydric) type.
3. The soil must be saturated or covered with water at some time during each growing season." (source)
   

more on types of wetlands

history of wetlands

Tall Timbers Research Station:

• originally a private quail hunting plantation
• Henry L. Beadel left his land and resources to create: “a fire type nature preserve … to conduct research on the effects of fire on quail, turkey and other wildlife, as well as on vegetation of value as cover and food for wildlife, and experiments on burning for said objectives.”
• (nimrods=from a biblical mighty hunter)
  

Longleaf adaptations to summer fire:

• thick bark insulates the key layer under the bark
• longleaf seeds are large with enough moisture and nutrients to sprout in the fall when fire is less likely
  

• it spends several years looking like a clump of grass and growing a long root (up to 8 feet long in the first year).  The clump of needles protects the growth bud
  

• stores food in its taproot to grow quickly through the stages where it would be most vulnerable in a fire
• seeds are plentiful only every 5-7 years, keeping down the populations of animals that eat the seeds

• Mutch hypothesis, that longleaf and wiregrass have evolved to promote fires.  Longleaf is very resinous (the most so of the southern pines) so burns well
• did features that burn well evolve because they gave the species an advantage?
• did the species just evolve to survive fires
  
• wiregrass has a lot of dead leaves, but that may be an adaptation to drought
• is the ecosystem shaped by anthropogenic (human-set) fires?  http://php.scripts.psu.edu/faculty/a/g/agl/Abrams-Nowacki%202015%20JSF.pdf
• tree rings and layers of sediment deposited in swamps allow statistics on how frequent fires were
• are the fires more frequent than lightening would cause?
• we know indians burned in New England from settler's reports, but disease hit SE indians before there were many settlers
• one extreme: this was a human-created ecosystem that evolved in response to indian-set fires
• other extreme; the fire frequency we see could have been caused entirely by lightening

The way of thinking that says we have conquered nature sets up culture and nature as opposites
but thinking about it another way human culture is a part of nature