Southern Forested Wetlands

Originally published in 1998, Southern Forested Wetlands is an up to date, one source compendium of current knowledge on the wetland ecology of America’s southern forests. This book presents both the ecological and management aspects of these important ecosystems. The book was compiled by members of the Consortium for Research on southern forested wetlands, and was a collaboration of those working to conserve, study, and manage these economically and environmentally influential areas. The book covers geographic ranges from West Virginia to Florida, to Texas and inland north to Arkansas and Tennessee. It also addresses specific wetland types, including deep-water swamps, major and minor alluvial flood plains, pocosins and Carolina bays, mountain fens, pond cypress swamps, flatwoods wetlands, and mangroves.

This book draws together the latest findings on the hydrological processes, community organization, and stress physiology of freshwater, tidally influenced land-margin forests of the southeastern United States. It describes the land use history that led to the restricted distribution of these wetlands, and provides descriptions of the hydrology, soils, biogeochemistry, and physiological ecology of these systems, highlighting the similarities shared among tidal freshwater forested wetlands.

The early 1990's marked an environmental watershed for our countly. Under two federal administrations significant environmental legislative, regulatOly and institutional changes took place which affected our Nation's wetland resources. Injust a few years, we have seen rapid evolution in the way in which we view wetlands with more emphasis on specific wetland types and the geographic provinces in which they occur. This Southern Appalachian Man and the Biosphere (SAMAB) conference on "Wetland Ecology, Management and Conservation" represents just one example of our desire to understand wetlands in non-coastal regions of the southern United States. The backdrop to this conference was one where the government, universities, and private sector have come together to create a broader and more sophisticated understanding of environmental stewardship for our water resources, especially wetlands. Although enforcement of environmental legislation by federal and state government agencies - limited by manpower shortages, budgetary constraints and undermined by weak enforcement - remains strong as measured by world standards; the realization that environmental degradation of wetlands is likely to get much worse necessitates a greater commitment and increased resource allocation for wetland protection and management. These contiIUled pressures on the wetland resource will create substantial opportunities for the application of environmentally-sound technologies and interdisciplinmy modeling teams to keep abreast of the factors influencing wetland integrity and function in the last half of the 1990's.