The Southern Forest Futures Project has been designed to evaluate the implications of potential futures for the many goods and services forests in the Southeastern United States provide. To ensure that the Futures Project is comprehensive and relevant, we have begun with a thorough scoping of issues using a process that elicits input from various interested publics. We have held public meetings in 14 locations around the South and through 3 online "Webinars." The meeting sites provided at least two public meetings in each of five ecological subregions and no fewer than one public meeting in each State. We gathered > 2,200 comments using a structured-workshop format and processed the compiled data to define a comprehensive view of how forces of change may reshape forests, and how these changes could affect the various goods, services, and values of forest ecosystems. We also identified a set of meta-issues that warrant indepth analysis to evaluate their potential influence on the future of forests. These topics of concern include bioenergy, climate change, forest ownership change, invasive species, fire, taxes, and water. The input on meta-issues, forces of change, and resource implications will be used to organize subsequent stages of the Southern Forest Futures Project.

This report summarizes the findings of the Southern Forest Futures Project, also referred to in these pages as the Futures Project. The Southern Forest Futures Project is an effort to anticipate the future and analyze what the interaction of future changes might mean for the forests of the South and the services the forests provide in the region's 13 States (fig. 1). We explore a labyrinth of driving factors, forest outcomes, and human implications to sketch how the landscape of the South might change.

The U.S. Coastal Plain consists of seven sections: the Northern Atlantic, Eastern Atlantic, Peninsular Florida, Southern Gulf, Middle Gulf-East, Middle Gulf-West, and Western Gulf. It covers a large area, consists of a diverse array of habitats, and supports a diverse array of uses. This report presents forecasts from the Southern Forest Futures Project that are specific to the Coastal Plain, along with associated challenges to forest management in this subregion: warmer temperatures; increases in urban land use; population increases; more planted pine; increased harvesting for bioenergy; impacts to hydrology and water quality; increased impacts from invasive organisms; and longer, more intense wildfire seasons. Understanding these impacts and the tools available to address them will be key to effective management of the Coastal Plain forests.

Forest land managers face the challenges of preparing their forests for the impacts of climate change. However, climate change adds a new dimension to the task of developing and testing science-based management options to deal with the effects of stressors on forest ecosystems in the southern United States. The large spatial scale and complex inter