Bob Brussack's List: Georgia Studies

• only about 12,000 scattered  acres retain an old-growth component with a biologically diverse understory
• the species in this ecosystem are not only  resistant to fire but also dependent upon it
• the longleaf pine–grassland forest may well be the most diverse North  American ecosystem north of the tropics, containing rare plants and animals not found anywhere else
• The longleaf-grassland forest that we know today is a natural system of Holocene origin. In other words, it has most likely  never existed absent a human presence. Indeed, some researchers estimate that this ecosystem is no more than 5,000 years old.
• lumber
• naval stores industry,
• forage
• large-scale timber industry
• exclusion of fire
• With the decline of pulp  and paper in the last decade, there has been an effort to restore some of these lands to longleaf, but a lack of incentive  and, most importantly, knowledge about longleaf ecology has proven a difficult gap to bridge.
• Janisse Ray, in her elegant book of essays Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, exposed many Georgians to the beauty and importance of the longleaf-grassland ecosystem.

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• The Georgia Piedmont lies between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Upper Coastal Plain.
• The southern Piedmont extends from Alabama and  Georgia northeastward through South Carolina and North Carolina.
• The boundary of the Piedmont on the southeastern side is the fall line, which generally separates the crystalline rocks of the Piedmont from the sedimentary rocks of the Atlantic Coastal Plain.

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• From the Late Proterozoic to the Early Cambrian,  the Grenville mountains eroded, and streams transported sediments to the sea, which covered much of Georgia at that time.
• From the Cambrian to the Pennsylvanian periods, the southeastern part of North America lay south of the equator in a relatively  tropical climatic zone.
• During the Late Devonian, a shallow sea flooded the northwestern part of Georgia and much of central North America.
• The third and final Paleozoic mountain-building event, beginning in the Late Mississippian and continuing throughout the Pennsylvanian  and Permian periods, affected the Appalachian region. This event, the Alleghanian orogeny, was caused by the collision of  Africa (part of the continent of Gondwana) with North America, resulting in the complete closure of the Iapetus Ocean and  the formation of the supercontinent Pangaea.
• During the Pennsylvanian period (318 to 299 million years ago), most of Georgia was located within the core of a large Appalachian  mountain range, which was 4 to 7 kilometers high and rivaled the Himalayan mountain system (in present-day Asia) in size.  There was no ocean to the east; rather, the continent of Africa was welded to North America. The sea lay far to the west,  in central North America. Along the western side of the Appalachian mountain range lay a vast swampy lowland covered by lush  tropical forests that were inhabited by fern-like plants, huge insects, and amphibians.

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