Pine barrens, pine plains, sand plains, or pineland areas occur throughout the U.S. from Florida to Maine (see Atlantic coastal pine barrens) as well as the Midwest, West, and Canada and parts of Eurasia. Perhaps the most well known pine-barrens area to North Americans is the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Pine barrens are generally pine forests in otherwise "barren" and agriculturally challenging areas. Such pine forests often occur on dry, acidic, infertile soils, and also include grasses, , and low . The most extensive pine barrens occur in large areas of sandy (including ), lakebeds, and outwash Fluvial terrace along rivers.
Description
Botany
The most common trees are the
jack pine,
red pine,
pitch pine,
blackjack oak, and scrub oak; a scattering of larger
is not unusual. The
understory includes grasses,
Cyperaceae, and forbs, many of them common in dry
, and rare plants such as the sand-plain gerardia (
Agalinis acuta). Plants of the
Ericaceae family, such as
blueberries and
bearberry, and shrubs, such as prairie willow and
hazel, are common. These species have adaptations that permit them to survive or regenerate well after fire.
Fauna
Pine barrens support a number of rare species, including
Lepidoptera such as the
Karner blue butterfly (
Plebejus melissa samuelis) and the barrens
buck moth (
Hemileuca maia). American black bears once roamed much of the area but were drove out by hunting and trapping. They are slowly returning to the pine barrens, and can be seen occasionally.
Fire ecology
The American Indians used fire to maintain such areas as rangeland.
Suppression of
has allowed larger climax forest vegetation to take over in most one-time barrens. Barrens are dependent on fire to prevent invasion by less fire-tolerant species. In the absence of fire, barrens will proceed through successional stages from pine forest to a larger climax forest, such as oak-hickory forest.
However, temperatures in a white pine forest on Long Island were high enough to destroy the pine cones which led to a slow recovery of the pine forest that varied depending on the availability of seedlings and the spatial variability in the conditions in the soil encountered by the seedlings.
See also
-
Atlantic coastal pine barrens
-
Eastern savannas of the United States
-
List of pine barrens
-
Long Island Central Pine Barrens
-
New Jersey Pine Barrens
-
Plymouth Pinelands
-
Sandhills (Carolina)
-
Serpentine barrens
-
Pine savanna
Sources
