The longleaf pine (Pinus palustris Mill.) forest ecosystems of the US southeastern Coastal Plain, among the most biologically diverse ecosystems in North America, originally covered over 24 × 106 ha but now occupy less than 5% of their original extent. The key factor for sustaining their high levels of diversity is the frequent application of prescribed fire uninterrupted in time and space. Pine fuels, critical to application of fire and regulated by canopy distribution, provide the nexus between silviculture and fire management in this system. Typical silvicultural approaches for this type were, in large part, developed to maximize the establishment and growth of regeneration as well as growth and yield of timber, with much less regard to how those practices might influence the ability to sustain prescribed burning regimes or the associated biodiversity. However, many landholdings in the region now include conservation of biodiversity as a primary objective with sustained timber yield as an important but secondary goal. This review synthesizes the literature related to controls of biodiversity for longleaf pine ecosystems, and silvicultural approaches are compared in their ability to sustain natural disturbance such as fire and how closely they mimic the variation, patterns, and processes of natural disturbance regimes while allowing for regeneration.

Land managers need new tools, such as spatial models, to aid them in their decision-making processes because managing for biodiversity, water quality, or natural disturbance is challenging, and landscapes are complex and dynamic. Spatially explicit population models are helpful to managers because these models consider both specieshabitat relationships and the arrangement of habitats in space and time. The visualizations that typically accompany spatially explicit models also permit managers to "see" the effects of alternative management strategies on populations of interest. However, the expense entailed in developing the data bases required for spatially explicit models may limit widespread implementation. In addition, many of the models are developed for one or a few species, and dealing with multiple species in a landscape remains a significant challenge. To be most useful to land managers, spatially explicit population models should be user friendly, easily portable, operate on spatial and temporal scales appropriate to management decisions, and use input and output variables that can be measured affordably.

Models of first-order fire effects are designed to predict tree mortality, soil heating, fuel consumption, and smoke production. Some of these models can be used to predict firstorder fire effects on animals (e.g., soil-dwelling organisms as a result of soil heating), but they are also relevant to second-order fire effects on animals, such as habitat change. In this paper, I review a sample of studies of first-order fire effects on animals that use aquatic, subterranean, and terrestrial habitats; use an envirogram as a graphical approach to organize first-and second-order fire effects for a single animal species; recommend how one could obtain better data using Species-Centered Environmental Analysis; and begin to model these effects.

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