National Wildlife Magazine: National Wildlife Federation’s award-winning, full-color nature magazine!

Treatment of America's wild creatures and places through full-color photo galleries, natural history features, outdoor adventure articles and news items of ecological concern. Conservation-minded magazine of nature and the environment. (Amazon.com)

The National Wildlife Federation is the largest American conservation organization, with over 5 million members and supporters in 47 state-affiliated organizations; its annual budget is over $125 million as of 2006. Its mission statement is: "inspire Americans to protect wildlife for our children's future."

Read National Wildlife Magazine, April/May 2008 Online

About This Issue
By Mark Wexler, Editorial Director

Ecosystems That Are Worth Protecting

ACCORDING TO EARLY American folklore, the forests of the southeastern United States once were so extensive that a squirrel could travel all the way from present-day Virginia to Florida without setting foot on the ground, simply by moving through the treetops of longleaf pines. An exaggeration, for sure. But it’s no overstatement to say that, at one time, a person could journey several hundred miles through the southeastern United States without ever leaving woodlands dominated by the stately pines.

Two centuries ago, more than 90 million acres of longleaf flourished in an arc from eastern Texas to Virginia—the only area in the world where this species of pine is found. Today, however, only about 3 percent of those original forests survive and longleaf continues to disappear at a rate of about 100,000 acres a year. It’s one of the nation’s least-known ecological tragedies—one that affects dozens of species of plants and animals.

As this issue’s article “America’s Forgotten Forest” explains, the longleaf pine ecosystem is among the richest in North America. Not long ago, for example, scientists in Georgia cataloged some 50 different types of plants growing in a single square meter of longleaf forest floor. Fortunately, points out writer Doreen Cubie, a movement to restore some of these flagging forests is “rippling across the region.”

Elsewhere in this issue, you can read about another important group of plants: the brilliant wildflowers that grow high in the Colorado Rockies, where for the past 18 years scientists have been conducting landmark tests on the effects of warming temperatures on subalpine meadows. Their results show that higher temperatures spawn a major shift in vegetation, with drought-adapted plants such as sagebrush moving into higher elevations and replacing the flowering species.

“The change would be more than aesthetic,” writes Senior Editor Laura Tangley, who visited the research site last summer. It has significant ramifications, she notes, “for the scores of subalpine insects, birds and mammals in the Rockies that depend completely on the seeds, leaves, pollen and nectar of nonwoody flowering plants.” See “Lessons of the Flowers.”

Plants also are the focus of author Janet Marinelli’s feature on how to entice nocturnal pollinators and other wildlife to a backyard after dark. “There’s a world of difference between flowers that strut their stuff by day and those that entice creatures of the night,” she writes. To learn why, read “Enjoying the Nightlife.”

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