A new report from the U.S. Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program provides the first comprehensive estimates of forest resources of the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley (LMAV) since 1986. Published by the Forest Service Southern Research Station (SRS) and authored by SRS forester Sonja Oswalt, Forest Resources of the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley provides current resource information and analysis to professionals, landowners, and the general public with interests in the area.
Victor Rudis and Richard Birdsey, both research foresters with the Southern Forest Experiment Station that preceded SRS, used FIA data collected from 1932 to 1984 to publish the first comprehensive report on the forest resources of the LMAV in 1986. By that time, forest area had declined from 11.8 million acres in the 1930s to an estimated 6.6 million acres, mostly due to clearing for soybean fields.
“We defined the LMAV in the same manner as Rudis and Birdsey, including counties in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi,” says Oswalt. “We expanded on the 1986 report, adding statistics from the FIA database to their original data.”
The LMAV, as defined in both reports, encompasses about 26.7 million acres of total land area. Forests cover about 7.6 million acres, or 28 percent of the land area. All but 36,000 acres of forest land are considered available for timber production.
The bottomland hardwood forests of the area provide important habitat to migratory bird species and a host of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. Over the last century, much of the LMAV forest has been lost to agriculture and development, although recent incentive programs have encouraged afforestation.
From The USFS Southern Research Station: https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/compass/2013/09/04/forest-resources-of-the-lower-mississippi-alluvial-valley/