School subscriptions can access more than 175 downloadable unit bundles in our store for free (a value of $1,500).ĭistrict subscriptions provide huge group discounts for their schools. To view these resources with no ads, please Login or Subscribe to help support our content development. More than 75% of the bottomland forests were cleared for farming once European settled started farming in Arkansas. These include the floodplains of the Mississippi River and its branches, bottomland hardwood forests, cypress swamps, headwater swamps, wet flat-woods and prairies, slope wetlands and others.īottomland forests border floodplains so must be able to tolerate "wet feet" like cypress swamps and water tupelo. It is now the rarest ecosystem in the state.Ībout 8% of Arkansas is covered by wetlands. Since the European settled came, over 95% of Arkansas's tallgrass prairie has been lost to farming and development. This also fertilized the soil and kept trees and shrubs from growing. Kept open by fires, the massive root systems would quickly regrow the scorched prairie grass. The tallgrass prairies could grow grasses more than eight feet tall. Of the rest, 16% is bottomland hardwood forest, 11% is Oak-pine forest, and 1% is eastern cedar. Arkansas's forests are made up of 41% Oak-Hickory and 30% pine. Of that, less than 20% is in private hands and open to the public in the form of national forests. Today, of Arkansas's 33 million acres, 56% is made up of forest (almost 19 million acres). Also, in 1908, more than a million acres of forest in the Ouachitas and Ozarks was claimed by the federal government to start the Ouachita and Ozark National Forests and was protected from cutting. In addition, the mills that survived the lumber bust began selective logging, saving seed trees, and fire prevention. Especially if they are cut with regrowth in mind as some of the Arkansas's forests were. The lumber industry boomed and over the next 40 years almost 20-million acres of forest would be cut. Lumber companies came in and bought up large tracts of land and started harvesting wood. Then, in the late1800s, Arkansas was made accessible by expanding rail lines. These included bottomland hardwood forests, upland hardwood forests, loblolly pine in wet lowlands and short leaf pine on dry slopes and ridges. Arkansas once had a rich and diverse forest covering the Mississippi delta, coastal plain, Ouachita and Ozark Mountains.
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