Who mandated Fort Bragg to become a pine/wiregrass ecosystem?
A6. An ecosystem is not mandated; it is the long-term ecological result of all natural biotic factors (soils, vegetation, hydrology, geology) on a landscape level. In the spring of 1773 William Bartram, a naturalist from Philadelphia, traveled the southeast to record its flora and fauna and collect specimens. In his trips across the southeast coastal plain, to include the Carolinas, he described “…a vast forest of the most stately pine trees that can be imagined…. a forest of the great long-leaved pine…the earth covered with grass, interspersed with an infinite variety of herbaceous plants, and embellished with extensive savannas,…” The longleaf pine-wiregrass ecosystem once covered approximately 90 million acres in the southeastern United States. This unique ecosystem, shaped by thousands of years of natural fires that burned through every 1-3 years, has been reduced to fewer than two million acres, representing a 97 percent decline. This loss is primarily attributed to fire s
