NEWS: The Biggest Threat to Georgia's Trees is Population Growth

By: Samuel Rivers, Leslie Daniels, Zachary Ivey, Amber Houston, and Khiyah Griffin
According to the Georgia Forestry Commission's Sustainability Report for January 2019, Georgia’s population is growing at record rates, which is leading to land conversion as cities urbanize and make more room for people to live, a process that the report states is a threat to forest sustainability.

Michael Hinson, the management forester of the Georgia Forestry Commission's Statesboro District Office, provided the report to the Ecology Beat.

According to Hinson, land conversion is “going to be taking trees that are currently growing or have been growing and turning that into stuff like apartment buildings, shopping centers; that’s what most of your deforestation is going as, and you’re mainly going to see that in your city areas.”

Jim Daniel, COO of American Forest Management, said “Everytime you see a new mall or apartment, guess where the trees are going?” He agreed that land conversion is the biggest threat that trees in Georgia are currently facing as the population grows.

An additional issue that trees may face is a species’ usefulness and ease of growing for companies trying to turn a profit with them. While this is not so much a threat to forests as a whole, being more difficult or more expensive to grow has largely resulted in the endangerment of the longleaf pine tree.

“Before the United States became the United States… This whole area, South Georgia, particularly, there was a lot more longleafs growing than there is now,” said Hinson, “...people cut it down and used it and then naturally, people were gonna generate towards whatever tree is gonna make them the most money.”

According to Randy Tate, a partnership coordinator for the Longleaf Alliance (an organization dedicated to managing and restoring the longleaf pine population), land conversion also complicates the growing of longleafs as they need fire every few years in order to stay healthy, coming from what he described as a fire-based ecosystem. This is naturally much more difficult to provide in the typical urban ecosystem that most land conversion occurs in.

There is good news in the report, as well. Outside of the threat that land conversion presents, Georgia’s forests have been stable at around 24 million acres of forested land for the past 50 years, and overall tree growth still outpaces tree removal.

But if current trends continue and urban areas continue to grow through land conversion, sustainability and stability may become more difficult to maintain.