Botany The most common trees are the
jack pine,
red pine,
pitch pine,
blackjack oak, and
scrub oak; a scattering of larger
oaks is not unusual. The
understory includes grasses,
sedges, and forbs, many of them common in dry
prairies, and rare plants such as the sand-plain gerardia (
Agalinis acuta). Plants of the
heath family, such as
blueberries and
bearberry, and shrubs, such as prairie willow and
hazel, are common. These species have adaptations that permit them to survive or regenerate well after fire.
Fauna Pine barrens support a number of rare species, including
Lepidoptera such as the
Karner blue butterfly (
Plebejus melissa samuelis) and the barrens
buck moth (
Hemileuca maia). American black bears once roamed much of the area but were extirpated by hunting and trapping. They are slowly returning to the pine barrens, and can be seen occasionally.
Fire ecology The American Indians used fire to maintain such areas as rangeland. Suppression of
wildfires has allowed larger climax forest vegetation to take over in most one-time barrens. Barrens are dependent on fire to prevent invasion by less fire-tolerant species. In the absence of fire, barrens will proceed through
successional stages from pine forest to a larger climax forest, such as
oak-hickory forest. However, temperatures in a white pine forest on Long Island were high enough to destroy the pine cones which led to a slow recovery of the pine forest that varied depending on the availability of seedlings and the spatial variability in the conditions in the soil encountered by the seedlings. ==See also==