Monday, August 3, 2020
Maritime forests on Georgia's barrier islands feature large and lovely live oak trees draped in Spanish moss. Live oaks currently face numerous stressors, but we have limited formal ecological knowledge regarding these forests. We worked with natural resource managers and staff on 5 islands to better understand their concerns and knowledge regarding live oak regeneration and forest dynamics. We co-developed a research agenda to address their most pressing concern – widespread deer herbivory of live oak seedlings – and increase our knowledge of basic live oak forest ecology.