The Legacy of a Red Hills Hunting Plantation: Tall Timbers Research Station & Land Conservancy

6. Classic and Early Long-Term Studies

93 The early philosophy of the Tall Timbers founders was to conduct long-term “classic” research. As Ed Komarek later said, “The founders recognized the absolute necessity of developing public and scientific interest through long-term experiments, research, and demonstrations. This meant a research institution so well structured and of such permanence and continuity that experiments lasting a century or more could be undertaken and brought to fruition.” A model and inspiration was Rothamsted Agricultural Station near Harpenden in Hertfordshire, England. Rothamsted is probably the oldest agricultural research station in the world, having been founded in 1843 by John Bennet Lawes, owner of the Rothamsted Estate. Permanent study plots to record crop yields were established 150 or more years ago and continue to be used as such to this day. For example, the first winter wheat crop of the Broadbalk experiment was sown in autumn 1843, and this crop has been sown and harvested on the same field every year since. Following this example, the first Tall Timbers projects were study plots and projects that were planned for minimum 100-year investigations. The Stoddard Fire Ecology Plots (with Ronald E. Masters) The Stoddard Fire Ecology Plots (originally called the Tall Timbers Research Station Fire Ecology Plots—the name evolved in honor of Stoddard’s work on this and other seminal aspects of fire ecology) were established in 1959 on Tall Timbers Research Station . This study is now one of the longest-running fire frequency studies in the southeastern United States. The purpose was to study and demonstrate the impact of varying fire intervals and to a lesser degree the impact of a season of prescribed fire on forest succession and the development of herbaceous plant communities in old-field conditions . Old fields are those that were cleared and used for intensive agriculture, usually cotton, for decades in the 1800s and the early 1900s. Following economic collapses, the fields were allowed to go fallow with the exception of scattered tenant farms. Over time 6 classicandearly Long-Termstudies                       94 · Part II. Ecological Research and Outreach and with regular burning, a secondary but mature pine forest developed. This was the case on Tall Timbers. Herbert L. Stoddard selected sites on Tall Timbers to locate eighty-four ½-acre plots on a wide variety of conditions related to drainage, timber, and soils. The sites were to havetwenty-ninedifferentfiretreatments,theintervalsrangingfrom1to75yearsinboth “winter” (February–March) and summer (different months). Unburned plots would be observed for comparison. The longer the burn interval, the more replications (i.e., duplicate plots) were created to anticipate accidental burns. For example, there were three annual winter burn plots, W1A, W1B, and W1C, but there were five 75-year interval winter burn plots: W75A, W75B, W75C, and W75X and W75Y. After Roy Komarek marked and photographed the plots, Leon Neel and James P. Greene surveyed, mapped, and measured individual trees and woody plants more than 2inchesindiameter.Dr.MalvinaTrussellsurveyedherbaceousplants.Alltheplotswere burned in the winter of 1959–1960. This baseline survey data were published in the Tall Timbers Bulletin Number 2, titled Tall Timbers Research Station Fire Ecology Plots. In the 1970s, Drs. Richard Vogl and Robert K. Godfrey conducted botanical studies on the vegetation changes that occurred with the different fire regimes. During the 1960s and 1970s, Dr. Willard Whitcomb and Don L. Harris maintained insect pitfall traps on several of the plots. In the summer of 1973, Leigh Perkins Jr. conducted a study on the response of small mammals to fire regimes on the plots (see Masters and Robertson 2007). In 1992, Dr. David W. Mehlman from Florida State University published the results of an analysis of Godfrey’s 1973 plant species census from the plots (presence/absence data), which demonstrated that the species richness was higher on plots where fire was more frequent than on unburned plots. In 1994, staff plant ecologist Dr. Sharon Hermann recensused the trees and measured vegetation structure on the plots, showing the figure 6.2. Prince Jinright burning plot W1C in February 1972. Robert L. Crawford, Tall Timbers Archives. Classic and Early Long-Term Studies · 95 dramatic changes in forest structure that resulted from lengthening the intervals of fire return. In 1997, the Tall Timbers research staff decided to abandon the winter longer-fireinterval plots and all of the summer burned plots and most of the unburned plots. The accumulated data suggested that fire intervals longer than three or four years had little influence on plant...