Virginia McDaniel is a forestry technician based at the Southern Research Station of the U.S. Forest Service in Hot Springs. This cold, breezy morning, she hikes along a steep Ozark Mountain ridge trail edged with giant old-growth white oak trees. She's accompanied by Josh Graham, Fire and Aviation Staff Officer for both the Ouachita and Ozark-St. Francis National Forests.
McDaniel stops along a sunny ledge to describe the difference between the Ozarks and the Ouachita Mountains — where she works.
"The Ouachita Mountains are an east-west trending mountain range located in western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma," she said. "The Ouachitas were formed when the South American continental plate crashed into the North American plate resulted in a faulted mountain range. The Ozarks, which encompass portions of Arkansas, Oklahoma and Missouri, are a high plateau that's been eroded over time."
The Ouachitas contain native stands of shortleaf pine which favor warm southern slopes. Distinct from longleaf pine trees which are more common on the Ozarks, shortleaf pines can reach 120 feet in height and are covered in reddish-brown scaled bark, topped with bunched clusters of short blueish-green pine needles.
Early nineteenth-century botanist and explorer, Thomas Nuttall, after first encountering the virgin pine woodlands noted a resemblance to cultivated parks, "richly enameled with a profusion of beautiful and curious flowers," including purple coneflower, coreopsis, woodland sunflower, violets, milkweed, along with a profusion of native grasses.
"Enough grasslands," McDaniel added, "to support buffalo and elk that were roaming around, as well as prairie warblers, bobwhite quail and lots of deer and turkey. It was a very, very wild, teeming with life."
Indigenous tribes inhabiting the Ouachita and Ozark Mountains understood the benefits of setting fire to virgin woodlands during seasonal migration to encourage older-growth trees and understory grasslands to flourish. European colonists and early American settlers, however, suppressed fire to protect homesteads and timber holdings, which were repeatedly clear-cut. Fire prevention continued into the late 20th century, publicly encouraged by Forest Service icon Smokey Bear. The result: ancient woodland pine savannas turned into dense dark forests.
"As trees grow, they create leaf and pine needle litter," McDaniel said. "If that litter is not burned off, it builds up, blanketing the plants, grasses and flowers that grow beneath. So we lose the plants, the insects, the birds and all of those species that are dependent upon these woodland grasslands."
Excess litter resulting from closed-canopy forests smother valuable native seed banks, she said, which can lie dormant for decades, waiting for the right conditions, including fire, to germinate.
U.S. Forest Service Fire and Aviation Staff Officer Josh Graham oversees fuels and fire management on both the Ozarks and Ouachita National Forests, a total of 3.2 million acres. He says he spent his early career suppressing forest fires.
"I was on hotshot crews, smoke jumpers [parachuting from] aircraft and helicopters out West," Graham said. "I needed to come to the South to understand prescribed fire."
Like prescription medicine, prescribed fire is carefully administered under specific climate conditions to help clear congested forests.
"The humidity has to be under roughly 30%, the air at a certain temperature, and wind direction has to be such that the smoke doesn't impact residents and schools in the area."
Forestry fire crews bulldoze, or hand-dig controlled burn lines, he said, to contain fire spread, also using lakes, rivers and creeks as protective boundaries.
"It's not out-of-control crazy flame lengths. Controlled fire will kill all the woody things that are growing [beneath maturing and older growth trees], and the leftover ash put nitrogen back into the soil."
With assistance from The Nature Conservancy and Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission, along with support from U.S. Forest Wildfire Crisis Strategy Division, Ouachita National Forest Service staff in 2012 embarked on a Shortleaf Pine Bluestem Restoration Project which now encompasses 200,000 acres in western Oklahoma and eastern Arkansas, supported by the federal Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program.
"A shortleaf pine tree is an incredibly fire tolerant tree that's found across the eastern United States," Virginia McDaniel said. "It's one of the only pines that can re-sprout from the meristem, and even if you scorch the needles up to 95%, the tree will come back. And one of the main places you can still find shortleaf pine is in the Ouachita National Forest."
Shortleaf pine ecosystems have declined across the eastern United States, she said, but in the Ouachita National Forest, they are holding steady, with groves regenerating due to prescribed fire regimes.
"All of the grasses and flowers that were in the understory came right back up," she said. "All those seeds were in the seed bank just waiting for the right conditions to grow and bloom. So the influx of sunlight from getting rid of mid-story trees and the influx of nutrients from the ash provide the right conditions for plants beneath to germinate."
Including big and little bluestem grasses, a native prairie plant with deep soil and stabilizing roots. Native tallgrass prairie ecosystems, once abundant in Arkansas and Oklahoma pre-settlement, have all but disappeared, plowed under for Bermuda and fescue hay crops, corn, wheat and soybean crops, or bulldozed to make way for human habitat.
"And if you have bluestem you can guarantee that there are a bunch of other hosted species that are associated with it, that will come along too," she said. "This pine bluestem woodland has over 600 species of forbs -- flowering plants -- and grasses so while we call it the bluestem restoration project, it is really the restoration project of 600 different species."
McDaniel says small-scale shortleaf pine restoration work first began in the 1990s on the Ouachitas to protect a feisty little black and white woodpecker, the males showing a tiny red cockade or streak above their white feathered cheeks.
"The Red-cockaded Woodpecker was listed as endangered in 1970, typically a coastal plain species found in longleaf pine forests," she said. "But a disjunct population exists on the Ouachita National Forest, and in the 1990s this population was not doing very well because there was so much closed canopy forest and not a lot of open woodland," containing grassland insects and seeds.
This isolated population of Red-cockaded Woodpeckers, for decades fostered by forest service biologists on the Ouachitas, is now increasing due to the Shortleaf Pine Bluestem Restoration Project.
"As soon as we starting thinning and burning larger patches of forest, that was when the number of Red-cockaded Woodpeckers started going up," she said, "from ten nesting pairs in 1990, to 90 in 2024 which is an incredible increase for species long endangered. But the other wonderful news is that in October, the Red- cockaded Woodpecker was federally down-listed from endangered to threatened due to the work of the Forest Service and so many other conservation agencies across the southeastern United States."
Restoring short-leaf pine savannas takes scheduled intensive labor. Along with prescribed fire, crews remove smaller understory trees by hand, using chainsaws, applying herbicides on stumps to prevent re-sprouting.
"You want to create a condition where shortleaf pines are separated by about 40 feet or so," McDaniel said, "so you have enough light that's coming in and allowing all the herbaceous plants, grasses and flowers to grow."
McDaniel said the ten-year-long federal and locally funded restoration project was granted a six-year extension.
"And every year, the forests are improving. But one thing that we have noticed with the data is that second and third prescribed fires increases the diversity of the plants even more. Fire is not a one-time thing. It's like rain."
Josh Graham said successive prescribed burns are necessary to restore native woodlands.
"Our goal on the Ouachita and the Ozark is to meet the Forest Plan which gives us a range of prescribed fire. And if we're burning 300,000 acres, then we're treating the landscape like we should, on a natural, historic fire-return interval."
McDaniel says the public is welcome to view the Shortleaf Pine Bluestem Restoration Project in person.
"If you go south of Waldron, there's a road called the Buffalo Road which you can follow to the site," she said. "And there's actually an auto tour that has little signs that tell you about the restoration project. And one of my favorite parts is there's actually an acre which was not restored. So people will know what this forest looked like before we started this project. And just looking a few feet over? The change is almost unbelievable."
And for those who journey to experience the shortleaf pine bluestem habitat, bring along a pair of binoculars to spot rare Red-cockaded Woodpeckers and to hear the birds. Their call resembles the sound of a squeaky dog toy.
Red-cockaded Woodpecker audio, courtesy Cornell Lab of Ornithology | Macaulay, was recorded by Bob McGuire.
