The Invisible Biome

The Eastern Temperate Forest. Originally two thousand miles across, the great temperate broadleaf forest that once covered the eastern third of the United States represents one of only fourteen terrestrial biomes (vegetative expressions) described for all of planet earth. Unfortunately, this biome is the most disturbed of them all. In our own country, 96% of our native eastern deciduous forest has been cut down since European settlement. Yet, relative to the extremely diminished condition of the biome elsewhere in the world (the other temperate forest strongholds are located in eastern China and in Europe), North America, even with all of its disturbance, is nevertheless home to the most intact temperate broadleaf forest left on the planet.

One Forest: the world range of the temperate forest biome in the northern hemisphere.

What remains of our native forest in the eastern United States provides us with the world’s last chance to save a significant representative of one of the earth’s primary vegetative communities.

To grasp the Eastern Forest that grows in one's backyard as a representative of a far-flung biome, one must stand back and soak in the big picture. A few hundred years ago, the original forest covered the eastern continent from Maine to Florida, and from the shores of the Atlantic ocean to the Great Plains -- experiencing at its boundaries a shifting dance with prairies on its west, southern pines to its south, and boreal forest to the north. In North America, even in its diminished condition today, forest remnants boast a natural diversity of plants and animals surpassed only by the tropical rainforests. The Smokey Mountains, for instance, where the largest fragment of old-growth central hardwoods remain, boast over a 100,000 species, (not counting microbes) only a few of which are trees. Saving the native bio-diversity of American's eastern temperate forest is one of world's highest conservation priorities, and probably the least recognized.

The temperate broadleaf forest biome is an ancient one, its origins going back over sixty million years go to the end of the dinosaur era. The last of those great reptilians walked among magnolias and sweetgum trees, still signature trees of the temperate forests in the northern hemisphere. Throughout time, despite waves of formidable environmental challenges, the Forest has shown remarkable resilience, shrinking into fragmented islands in times of adversity, other times spreading out and forming a nearly unbroken and immense single forest spanning the continents. One must look at the immense geography that the original Forest covered and see how it adapted to a variety of pressures over millions of years of time, in order to appreciate the conservation value and challenges the biome faces today.