Drip torch in hand, Barry Couliette makes his way through the longleaf pines of northeast Florida’s Cary State Forest. A clean line of fire trails behind him.
The flames, only a few feet high, appear instantaneously — gasoline sparked to life by the lit spout of his drip torch. In their wake, piles of dry leaves and fallen pine needles turn to ash: the sight of fire doing its job.
Starting out with the Florida Forest Service in 1979 and joining the Alachua Conservation Trust in 2017, Coulliette has conducted hundreds of burns throughout his career. Nowadays, he spends most of November through July burning properties all over north Florida.
Prescribed fire, or controlled burning, is a slow and careful process. The ability to burn on a two- to three-year cycle is just as important to the longleaf pine’s survival as water or sunlight. Its absence can be fatal, completely changing the ecosystem of a pine forest.
Some burns take years of preparation, Coulliette said. He starts each job with a site visit, where he examines the property, then returns to the office to outline a detailed plan. To prepare for the burn, he sets fire lines — deliberate gaps that prevent fire from burning past a certain point — and notes existing natural barriers that will keep the blaze from growing out of control. He waits, sometimes months, for the right weather forecast and repeatedly returns to the land to make sure soil conditions are still safe. Only then does he ignite the first flame.
“Fire creates a clean slate,” Coulliette said. “After the burn, everything’s starting over.”
During drier times, burning becomes trickier. In 2022, Coulliette said, he conducted only 18 controlled burns — a worrisome fraction of the 40 to 50 he usually leads during the season. For a tree like the longleaf pine that depends on frequent fire, dry stretches and other changes that scientists link to climate change pose even more of a threat.
Think of sprawling, centuries-old forests, and the Pacific Northwest may come to mind: Colossal redwoods shooting upward toward the California and Oregon skies. But the east coast, too, once rose with dense pine forests teeming with trees that matched redwoods in, if not stature, regional symbolism.
The longleaf is an emblem of the Southeast, historically spanning close to 92 million acres from Virginia down through north and central Florida and eastern Texas. When Spanish settlers first set foot in St. Augustine in the 1500s, they were greeted by vast expanses of flat-top pines, their branches flaunting tufts of green needles and trunks that could reach heights of more than 100 feet.
But the legacy of the longleaf pine is also one of mutilation and mismanagement, as loggers axed millions of acres of trees to build the nation’s buildings, boats and bridges in the nineteenth century. Today, less than five percent of their original acreage remains.
The devastation of those numbers, and the pines’ status as a global biodiversity hotspot, have made longleaf pine forests an urgent conservation priority. Several organizations, including The Longleaf Alliance and northwest Florida’s 54,000-acre Nokuse Plantation, are working to restore the longleaf’s prominence in the Southern landscape. But maintaining these trees is a weather-dependent labor. And while their restoration is seen as an important strategy in preparing for climate change, those efforts are threatened by the unpredictability of climate change itself.
At the individual tree level, longleaf pines are extremely resilient to climate change, so much so that the U.S. Forest Service promotes replacing loblolly pines with longleaf as an adaptation measure. Longleaf pine growth rates increase under warming temperatures. The tree’s insect-repelling resin pushes back against beetle outbreaks. And the pine is remarkably wind-resistant.
But heralding the longleaf pine as a one-stop climate change fix is a mischaracterization, said Nicole Zampieri, a postdoctoral researcher at north Florida’s Tall Timbers Research Station and south Georgia’s The Jones Center at Ichauway. The truth of the tree is far more complex.
The species is built to withstand warm temperatures and extreme events, “but we don’t know how they’re able to withstand the increasing variation and severity of these events,” Zampieri said. “The worry is that there’s some tipping point that destabilizes the ecosystem all together.”
Already, climate change is cutting its own axe across Southern forests.
After Hurricane Michael swept through the panhandle with Category 5-strength winds in 2018, nearly 90 percent of trees within the storm center died. And while warming temperatures aren’t a threat to the longleaf pine, Zampieri said, drought conditions are. During especially dry seasons, the pine may close its pores and stop taking in carbon, stunting growth or killing the tree.
Still, the biggest threat to the longleaf pine, as Coulliette noted, is dwindling opportunities for prescribed fire. If you can’t burn, none of the tree’s built-in defenses stand a chance.
Above: Fire burns through longleaf pines on a property in Gilchrist County. (Courtesy of Lori Carroll)
Burning issue
The longleaf pine is a tree built for and by fire.
Only one year into its long life, the pine enters the grass stage: named for its resemblance to a small, ground-level, wiry bunch of grass and characterized by its impressive resistance to fire. Even at a mere 2- to 3-feet tall, young pines can withstand flames nearly double their height. They love fire and depend on it.
Burns also offer early protection from disease. Pines in the grass stage are susceptible to brown spot needle blight, a fungal disease that drastically slows height growth or can kill a tree. To fight the blight, longleaf pines should be burned within their first two years, destroying infected needles and beginning a lifelong cycle of vitalizing fire.
For the longleaf pine ecosystem to thrive, frequent, low-intensity surface fires are needed to give the rich understory of grasses and flowers access to proper sunlight. Without fire, shrubs and competing plants begin to crowd the forest floor, outgrowing the understory and blocking the sun's rays.
The ecosystem was naturally maintained through fire cycles sparked by lightning. But today, practices more closely mirror the fires historically set by southeastern Indigenous tribes — a cycle Coulliette upholds as part of the North Florida Prescribed Burn Association (PBA).
A prescribed-fire mentor, most of the burns Coulliette conducts are instructional. At each site, he may be joined by anywhere from a handful to 40 PBA members and landowners hoping to learn through observation.
To prepare for a burn, he said, he’s paying attention to more than a dozen elements: rain, humidity, soil moisture and fuel, or the types of plants on the forest floor, to name a few. Landowners may think they’ve mastered the process after attending only a few burns, but conditions are always changing.
“It’s hard to get people to understand the nuances of their own property,” Coulliette said. “Everybody wants prescribed fire to be cookie cutter, but it’s not.”
As Earth’s average temperature warms, the climate has become more prone to extremes, he said. While 2022 was a notably dry year, this January brought so much rain that typically dry land became saturated. In the past, rain was typically followed by two to three good burn days, Coulliette said, but now it might rain for two weeks straight then not at all, putting landowners in a perpetual Goldilocks situation — conditions are never quite right.
When done correctly, prescribed fire isn’t meant to be dangerous. But drier weather has made burning a greater risk in recent years, Nokuse Plantation Director Matt Aresco said.
“With climate change, wildfires can cause real devastation,” he said. “One of the prime concerns for the future is wildfire that is difficult to control, especially due to extended drought conditions.”
In his 18 years at Nokuse Plantation — a private preserve in the Florida Panhandle devoted to longleaf pine restoration — Aresco has watched the seasons and weather change. One thing he’s noticed, he said, is longer periods of drought.
Late spring and fall both tend to be drier seasons, he said, with October the driest month of the year. But over the past five years, droughts have also settled in during the winter and generally wet summer months, shortening the windows for safely burning, Aresco said.
Warming temperatures have also moved longleaf growing seasons forward, he said, meaning young pines may start candling — or sprouting new seedlings not yet protected by a layer of needles — as early as February. As a result, landowners may accidentally burn during an early growing season, he said, killing young buds that are still highly vulnerable to fire.
Drier seasons present a particular threat to old-growth longleaf, senior trees that can be more than 400 years old. On Nokuse Plantation, the oldest trees are around 130 years old, planted in the early 20th century after most old-growth forests were logged.
The longer a longleaf pine is kept from fire, Aresco said, the more susceptible it is to being consumed by a controlled burn. Old-growth stands survived decades of U.S. fire-suppression policies before land managers understood such laws hurt trees and made wildfire more dangerous. Those stands tend to accumulate thick, dry layers of duff — partly decayed material like wood and leaves — around the base. If fire isn’t reintroduced slowly and during cool, low-humidity conditions, he said, it risks causing a duff fire that could kill the tree’s roots.
“Every once in a while, [an old-growth pine] will get struck by lightning and die,” Aresco said. “When there’s not much left, every tree you lose is really sad.”
Protecting private land
The longleaf pine’s erasure was a tragedy of more than southern landscape. It was also devastating in loss of habitat. More than 30 endangered and threatened species are endemic to the highly interconnected longleaf pine ecosystem.
Gopher tortoises burrow beneath the sandy soils, creating hollow tunnels six feet underground that shelter eggs and protect hundreds of other species. To escape the sweltering heat or a fire, animals like the Florida pine snake, gopher frog and indigo snake all seek refuge in these burrows.
For Kimberly Tillman, the magic of the longleaf pine isn’t so much in the tree itself as it is in one of the birds that calls it home.
A wildlife biologist and partnership coordinator with the Alachua Conservation Trust, Tillman has worked alongside the red-cockaded woodpecker for more than 20 years. The woodpecker, named for the almost imperceptible red streak splashed across its head, is the only one of its kind in Florida to make its home inside living pine trees.
As longleaf pines near 100 years old, Tillman said, their centers are softened by a heart-rotting fungus, allowing the red-cockaded woodpecker to drill into the tree’s bark and nest within the still-hard exterior. The hole is deep enough to release a dripping layer of sap that repels predators like raccoons and hawks, she said. In exchange for this protection, woodpeckers snack on the beetles and bugs that damage longleaf pines.
“It’s amazing to watch that relationship out in nature — how this bird is helping and working with this tree, and they're just living and growing from each other,” Tillman said. “That was my first taste of the longleaf habitat.”
Afterward, falling in love with the tree itself was easy.
She started viewing the longleaf pine’s needles as beautiful lungs, breathing in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen back into the atmosphere. She read studies explaining how pines help keep water in aquifers, moving liquid up and down through its internal layers. The longleaf pine, Tillman said, became a beacon guiding us toward our quest for a cleaner Earth.
Because longleaf pine habitats are overwhelmingly owned privately, targeting landowners is key. It’s not possible to force individuals to integrate climate change into forest-management plans, so conservation efforts often focus on ensuring private land is part of the conversation.
Tillman works through the Florida Wildlife Corridor, a connected statewide network of public and private conservation lands geared toward protecting natural habitats and mitigating climate change.
She’s focused on establishing the Ocala to Osceola (O2O) Wildlife Corridor. The stretch, in the heart of the longleaf pine’s southern range, is a critical link in the state’s greater corridors, she said, and connects three main areas: Ocala National Forest, Camp Blanding and Osceola National Forest.
Because increasing green space can help remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, the Florida Wildlife Corridor is one way of promoting climate resilience. The O2O passage takes it one step further, Tillman said, by creating a climate buffer that better enables habitats to bounce back after extreme events.
“If you’re out in a hurricane with an umbrella and you’re by yourself, you’re going to get wet,” she said. “But if you’re out in a hurricane with 100 people [with umbrellas] around you, you’re not going to get so wet.”
Longleaf pine preservation is also upheld by conservation easements: agreements between a landowner and government or conservation organization to permanently protect property. In exchange for selling the right to certain land uses, landowners typically receive tax benefits or direct payment.
In the case of the pine, this means landowners don’t have to worry about the future of their property — the trees will be cared for, even as climate change continues to make that more challenging.
Ben Williams, a fisherman turned certified burn manager, had been working on behalf of the St. Johns Riverkeeper for 12 years when he and his wife, Louann, began looking for land. Now, they own 3,800 acres in Putnam County, protected by two state conservation easements.
Having lived in north Florida for almost 60 years, Williams was no stranger to prescribed fire. He’d seen cattle ranchers burn in the forests, he said, and knew Indigenous people like the Timucua were burning well before Juan Ponce de León put his boot on the coast in 1513.
With help from the PBA and the University of Florida Forest Stewardship Program, he said, he learned to burn while keeping in mind information he already knew to be true: warming temperatures weren’t the problem — it was that the weather was becoming more unsettled, patterns more “herky-jerky.”
PBA’s greatest impact, Williams said, was its ability to meet people where they are — “old redneck landowner to old redneck landowner” — and help them see the value of conservation easements.
“You get somebody who loves the land, then they get old and die, and their kid that got a law degree and lives in Chicago looks at it and says, ‘Man, I can subdivide that and make some money,’” Williams said. “With a conservation easement, the only person who’s going to buy that land is somebody who’s going to maintain it.”
It isn’t just what landowners do today, he said. It’s what they set in motion.
Future through reforestation
Despite the odds, the future of the longleaf pine is a hopeful one — at least according to Steve Jack, executive director of east Texas’ Boggy Slough Conservation Area.
There’s been a strong regional effort over the past 15 years devoted to restoring the pine to a considerable portion of its historic range. As long as frequent fires continue, he said, he expects success. But when Jack envisions the near future of the longleaf pine, he pictures an effort rooted in reforestation.
“A lot of these restored forests aren’t going to look like the classic examples of a longleaf pine forest that are held up for people to see,” he said. “They’re young forests. They’re not decades-old forests.”
Climate change presents its own set of challenges when it comes to replanting. For one, while mature trees may be more able to manage drastic shifts between wet and dry weather, young pines are more vulnerable — and it’s hard to manage a forest if you can’t keep your young alive, Jack said.
Unexpected drought conditions also make it more difficult to find the right time to put seedlings in the ground. Typically, landowners take advantage of rainy seasons, so disaster strikes during years when the rain suddenly dries up for six weeks after planting a young pine. Reforestation then becomes more expensive and time-consuming, as landowners might have to buy a new set of seedlings and wait until the next year to replant.
But the most valuable asset when it comes to replanting is patience, Jack said. It takes longleaf pines at least 30 years to start reliably producing fertile seeds and up to 100 years to fully mature, meaning most landowners reforesting are contributing to a landscape they will never see.
Luckily, for some, imagining the beauty of what’s to come is enough.
Lori Carroll grew up believing there was nothing more beautiful than a wide, open piece of land covered with grass, cows and massive grandaddy oak trees. Raised on a farm in Providence, Florida, a small community 45 minutes north of Gainesville, she traded tobacco and livestock for 560 acres of future forest in Gilchrist County.
Over the past few years, Carroll and her husband, Bob, have planted 13,000 young longleaf pines across their property — trees the couple won’t see fully mature during either of their lifetimes.
Carroll and her husband are new to prescribed fire, she said, but they plan to continue burning every two years to give their longleafs the chance to thrive. It can take land just as many years as it was denied fire to return to the way it was, she said, so her property might need 30 years of diligent burning to look how it once did.
It’s a waiting game — and one Carroll and her husband are prepared to play, even if they won’t see it to the end.
“One thing my husband likes to say is that in 300 years, this property is going to be drop dead gorgeous.”