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LISTEN: A recent 10-year period saw millions of new longleaf pines in the Peach State. GPB’s Benjamin Payne reports.
A new study has found that longleaf pine growth is increasing in the Southeast, with some of the biggest gains in Georgia, marking good news after years of work by conservationists to protect one of the state’s most iconic trees.
Between 2010 and 2020, Georgia added nearly 50 million new longleaf pines and just over 20 million new seedlings, according to ecologists at the U.S. Forest Service.
Publishing in the scientific journal Forests, lead researcher Kevin Potter and his team found that this bounceback was part of a larger trend across a nine-state region, which altogether added about 225 million longleaf pines over that time period, bringing the total estimated number of trees to just over 1 billion…