In the soft twilight glow of dawn and dusk, Leslie Thiel often emerges from her house in Jackson Springs, North Carolina, and turns her ear to the over 200 surrounding acres her family has owned since the late 1700s. After years living in Virginia, Maryland, Italy, and Spain with her husband, who is in the US Navy, she’s ready to commune with home. 

Beneath the straight trunks and slender needles of the longleaf pines, Thiel stills herself and listens. “In the morning you hear the birds starting to chirp and come awake; at night, you’ve got all the frogs making their noises and singing,” she says. “It’s a special place.”

Although Thiel lives in a state where the longleaf pine is a cultural icon—it’s hailed in the first line of the official state toast and gives its name to a high civilian honor bestowed by the governor—experiences of actual longleaf are much less common here than they were at North Carolina’s founding. The tree once accounted for roughly 14 million acres in the eastern part of the state; less than 1 percent of that forest was left standing by the end of the 20th century.

Another North Carolina touchstone, its Tarheel State nickname, points to the forces underlying that decline. Largely using enslaved labor, landowners tapped longleaf trees for their sticky resin to produce tar, turpentine, and other products, then harvested them for timber. Exploitation picked up pace with the arrival of railroads, and once the old growth was gone, landowners often replaced the native forests with fields, pastures, or tree plantations.

A similar story holds across the tree’s native Southeastern range. Covering about 92 million acres before European contact, longleaf forests had been reduced to just 2.6 million acres by 2005. Tree plantations eventually reforested much of the region, growing from 2 million acres in 1952 to 37 million acres in 2010, but they did little for the longleaf.

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Steven McNulty, a senior research ecologist with the US Department of Agriculture’s Southeast Climate Hub, says commercial foresters generally disregarded the species in favor of faster-growing loblolly or slash pines. North Carolina alone had over 2.5 million acres of planted loblolly in 2013, close to the Southeast’s entire area of longleaf.

Burning in Green Swamp. | Photo by Ann Liles

The shift matters, McNulty explains, because loblolly lacks the ecological resilience that longleaf once provided for Southeastern forests. “When you just think about really short-term commercial use, the loblolly pine outperforms. In pretty much every other way, from insects and disease [resistance] to hurricane, wildfire, and drought tolerance, longleaf pine is far superior,” he says. As climate change brings higher temperatures and more extreme weather to the region, that resilience is becoming ever more important. 

In light of those pressures, a broad coalition of foresters, landowners, nonprofits, and government agencies is working together to bring the longleaf pine back to North Carolina and the Southeast at large. Since 2009, the America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative (ALRI) has established over 1.7 million acres of new longleaf forest while protecting over 360,000 acres of existing forest ecosystem.

That effort is now entering its next era. Last November, the ALRI adopted a new range-wide plan to guide longleaf conservation efforts from 2025 through 2040, with the intent to reach 8 million total acres of longleaf across the region by the end of that period. The initiative’s original goal was to achieve that 8 million acre target by the end of this year, but the figure currently stands about 2.8 million acres short. Jason Dockery, a forester for the Alabama Forestry Commission and past chair of the Regional Longleaf Pine Partnership Council that guides the ALRI, says the extended timeline reflects a greater understanding of what it will take to preserve the progress made so far.

Longleaf’s erstwhile dominance, Dockery explains, came from the species being uniquely resistant to fire. Young seedlings spend years in a “grass stage,” in which a dense clump of needles shields the tip of the plant, to develop far-reaching roots before springing up feet per year in the “bottlebrush stage.” In the precolonial Southeast, where forest fires from lightning or Indigenous management practices were common, this patient evolutionary strategy let longleaf outcompete faster-growing but more vulnerable vegetation.

Sandhills lily. | Photo by Sophia Torres

Reintroducing longleaf to the landscape thus means reintroducing fire. The ALRI helped coordinate over 1.7 million acres of prescribed burning on longleaf forests in 2023 alone, but Dockery says those efforts must ramp up even further. 

“You can focus a lot on creating new acreage, but you also have to back up and maintain what you’ve got,” he says. “If you plant it, you’ve got to have a plan in place to get it burned, or it’s not going to remain a very viable longleaf ecosystem.”

The new plan also incorporates Longleaf for All, an effort to engage minority landowners in restoring the species. Matthew Vandersande, who coordinates with the ALRI through the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service(NRCS), says demonstration forests and peer-to-peer connections in historically underserved communities are helping reach landowners who hadn’t previously considered longleaf.

Casting a broad net is important because Southeastern land ownership is highly fragmented. Private land accounts for about 86 percent of the region’s forests, with two-thirds in plots of less than 100 acres. And although many smallholders include timber harvests as part of their management plans, says Vandersande, they also value the cultural and environmental benefits of longleaf.

Support from NRCS efforts like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program and Conservation Stewardship Program, as well as philanthropic partners like the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, can help smallholders make up for the slower harvest potential of longleaf compared to other species. Harvesting fallen needles for pine straw, a popular landscaping cover, can also yield an economic return. 

Thiel takes advantage of those options on her property in Jackson Springs. A mix of timbering and straw production helps cover taxes and other expenses, while EQIP money has paid for professional prescribed burn teams. Although she retains her own certification as a burner, the funding ensures she can safely put fire on the landscape as she ages.

Jeff Marcus, a scientist with The Nature Conservancy, says those looking to follow in Thiel’s footsteps should reach out to their local ALRI implementation team. These groups, like the N.C. Sandhills Conservation Partnership he coordinates, help direct longleaf restoration funding and can connect landowners to the right programs for their needs.

For those without forest property, one of the best ways to get involved in protecting the longleaf is participating in local land-use discussions. Municipal and county-level zoning ordinances, Marcus points out, can determine if currently forested areas are lost to development. “It’s less glamorous and flashy than being on a controlled burn,” he admits, about sitting through a local planning board meeting. “But ultimately, that’s one of the areas where it’s most important to engage.”

A mature longleaf forest itself, Marcus continues, can be less than flashy on first sight, with its expanse of parallel trunks and uncluttered understory. But attention yields great rewards.

Each square meter of ground cover under longleaf can host dozens of grasses, wildflowers, and small perennials. Burrowing beneath are snakes, tiger salamanders, and the rare gopher tortoise. And for those like Thiel who listen quietly, the springtime canopy trills with the clear song of the Bachman’s sparrow, found nowhere else on Earth.