When people visit Tennessee for the first time, they are likely to notice the trees. Over half of the state – 14 million acres – is made up of forests, according to the Tennessee Department of Agriculture.
Many of these forests are akin to those found in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with dense canopies shielding the ground from sunlight for the majority of the day. These places are havens for many of Tennessee’s diverse wildlife, from mammals to reptiles.
But, in the last 30 years, researchers have found it wasn’t always this way. Imagine what the land might look like if those overhead canopies were stripped away, replaced with a rolling landscape covered in swaths of thick summer grasses, wildflowers and the occasional pine or oak tree scattered in the distance.
If one were to take a trip to the Catoosa Wildlife Management Area near Crossville, you wouldn’t have to imagine. You can see it. There, efforts have been underway since the 1990s to restore thousands of acres to what current research indicates to be their natural state: savannas.
Dwayne Estes is a professor of biology at Austin Peay University. He’s spent his career studying grasslands, and advocating for their restoration.
“All the grasses that were once there and the wildflowers that were once there that need sunlight, they disappear,” Estes said. “They get covered up with leaf litter. They get clouded out with too much shade, and so they simply go away. What we're beginning to learn, though, is that while some do indeed go away completely, never to come back, a lot of them are still there.”
But these survivors were only discovered around 50 years ago – and time is running out to save them.
A happy accident
In the 1990s, Clarence Coffey was serving as the assistant regional manager for Region 3 of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency (TWRA), overseeing 33 wildlife management areas across 24 counties in East Tennessee. It was around this same time a major pine beetle infestation swept the southeast, threatening to destroy thousands of acres of trees in the region.
“We started logging to salvage timber to prevent all of it from being lost,” Coffey said.
The TWRA recruited a logging company to clear cut hundreds of acres of pine trees in the Catoosa Wildlife Management Area outside of Crossville, both to prevent the beetles from spreading further while attempting to salvage the financial value of the lumber they left behind. But afterwards, they were left with large tracts of scarred land without hardly any trees. That’s when Coffey came up with an idea.
“The idea came to burn and see what happens,” he said.
And burn they did. The TWRA burned around 400 acres of land at Catoosa that had been home to closed canopy forest, mostly made up of pine, before the pine beetles forced clear cutting. Nobody expected what would happen next.
“Right before their very eyes, all this stuff started flowering, you know, after the trees were cut,” Estes said. “And the light was lit back to the ground. All this stuff started coming back that no one had seen.”
Native plants that were long thought to be lost on the Cumberland Plateau such as big bluestem, rattlesnake master, blazing star and hundreds of others began sprouting up where the forest had once stood. They had receded into the seed bank, or a collection of dormant seeds and roots that have been forced underground, waiting for the right moment to return.
“Some of those plants won't grow unless conditions are right,” Coffey said. “And when you see those plants growing, you know, ‘Yes, I think we've got it.’”
What Coffey knew he had was a grassland biome, similar to those he had visited before in the Midwest. The managers of Catoosa and TWRA’s Region 3 were so elated by this result, they invited members of the state Fish & Wildlife Commission to tour the site.
“I remember taking a wildlife commissioner through it,” Coffey said. “And he asked me, ‘How'd you all plant it?’ I said, ‘Well, we didn't.’ And he kept on. He thought I was kidding him. … And he said, ‘How did you plant this?’ I said, ‘No, it was there.’”
'The results speak for themselves'
Since the first burn at Catoosa, the TWRA has expanded the initial few hundred acres of savanna into several thousand across multiple wildlife management areas on the Cumberland Plateau. A few years ago, Don Chance became the manager at Catoosa and has continued the effort.
“When the opportunity came available to come up here and work, it was something I certainly was interested in,” Chance said. “And a large part of that is because I wanted to be involved in managing these woodlands and savannas that are on the property.”
He says the savannas are not only aesthetically pleasing, but they also help manage wildlife such as deer and turkey, making the TWRA staff’s jobs easier.
“There is no management strategy that I could choose that would be more beneficial than woodland and savannah restoration to manage for those game species,” Chance said. “And I mean, the results speak for themselves. There’s an insane amount of diversity in here, as plants are concerned, and wildlife species as well.”
The thick, lush grasses characteristic of these spaces provide grazing opportunities and coverage for deer and turkey to hide in. Meanwhile, they’ve also helped rejuvenate populations of quail, snakes and woodpeckers which had previously struggled in closed canopy forests.
“The goal would be for many people to have millions of acres like this in the state of Tennessee,” Chance said. “But you know, that's probably not feasible.”
That’s because of the maintenance requirements modern savannas have. 250 years ago, wildfires would naturally reduce tree coverage and allow ground plants to flourish. In addition to this, indigenous Americans would frequently do controlled burns as part of their cultural and spiritual practices. This allowed savannas to thrive.
But in the 21st century, wildfires pose a real danger to established communities nearby. And controlled burns are generally disfavored by the public.
“People are afraid of fire,” Chance said. “Due to generations of fire suppression, the fires that we have now are nothing like the fires that there used to be.”
So in order to maintain a grassland in Tennessee, Chance and his staff at Catoosa have to prescribe controlled burns every few years to help cut back on the tree canopy, replicating those natural conditions in defined areas.
“Catoosa has kind of been the poster child for what can happen if you open up the canopy and you reintroduce prescribed fire, and the responses that you can get,” he said.
It’s what drew Dwayne Estes into the field to begin with. He was so impressed by Catoosa’s grasslands that he began to seek out ways he could spread these spaces elsewhere in Tennessee and the southeast. That’s why he helped found the Southeastern Grasslands Institute in 2017, and began spreading the word.
“In our first year … I think we gave something like 67 presentations,” Estes said. “We went to anywhere we could: Washington, D.C., Russellville, Arkansas … you name it. We went there and just talked to anybody who would listen.”
And Estes says those efforts have paid off. In eight years, the institute has grown from a team of two to over 30. And they’ve successfully advocated for several grassland restoration projects.
“I feel like we have stumbled into one of the biggest stories of American conservation and American history with what we're now embracing,” Estes said.
Experts say time is short
But Estes stresses that there is a sense of urgency to his mission. Few people know about the importance of grasslands in the southeast, particularly in Tennessee. And time is running out to save them.
“A lot of that biodiversity that's hidden beneath our feet that we can't see has an expiration date,” Estes said. “And we don't know what the true expiration date is. … It could be one of the greatest collapses of biodiversity that we've ever experienced in eastern North America – waiting to die beneath our feet – that most people are not even aware of.”
His grasslands institute estimates that there could be as few as 25 years remaining to reintroduce prescribed fire and restore savannas in the Southeastern United States.
But Estes says there is hope. He’s excited about projects that his institute is actively working on, such as a partnership with the National Park Service which will reintroduce native grasslands to portions of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, among other places.
“So can we recover our landscapes? Can we stem the tide of biodiversity collapse?” Estes asks. “I believe we can. I believe these kinds of lessons from Catoosa provide a lesson of hope.”
