>>2760839I live in the SE US, there is still quite a bit of hardwood forest here but alot of the upland longkeaf pine has been put in pine stands. However there has been a bit of a trend towards people trying to convert them back to longleaf uplands.
Now a major caveat here, you can never truly convert hardwoods back into how it was, and it would take hundreds of years to recapture that balance that once existed in the soil composition, plants, etc. Having said that there are ways to speed the process up.
The big issue is that in the wild what happens is a wave of fast growing pioneer trees will always spring up and dominate a cleared area within a few years- this would be hardy trees like sweet gum, persimmon, red cedar, and cherry laurel. Under these trees shade tolerant oaks will grow stunted until they finally push through the canopy or columns open up from pioneer species falling. Over time the oaks/hickory will dominate the canopy and shade out other things. This could take 100s of years naturally.
Here most of hardwoods are lowlands so they aren't forested very heavily and the land is much less useful because it floods, so they are relatively intact but what has been hit hard are the longleaf/wiregrass upland savanahs.
Luckily these are much easier to Jumpstart because the soil has been supporting stands of similar pine trees.
The preferred method is to plant a stand of longleaf pine, then go through once they exit the grass-stage and get a little size on them (maybe 10 years) you start thinning them selectively to open up a few columns of light here and there. Start doing a burn every two years or so, then you have to go through near those light patches and cull anything that is a pioneer (like sweet gum) and let things like scarlet oak, black oak, red oak, and sand oaks grow). Keep clearing the longleaf in patches until you get a good balance, keep doing the burns, and within 50 years or so you can get pretty close to a natural longleaf upland.
