Introduction

Prior to Euro-American colonization beginning in the late 1700s and subsequent periods of land conversion and intensive resource extraction, the forests of eastern Kentucky’s Cumberland Plateau were part of a nearly contiguous forest covering much of the eastern United States.  The Eastern Deciduous Forest, sometimes called “The Great Forest,” was estimated to have covered as much as 380 million hectares (Leverett 1996; Bolgiano 1998), including an estimated 85 – 90% of Kentucky’s total land area (Evans and Abernathy 2008). While those forests would have fluctuated within a range of community associations, structural relations, and successional states, most forest on the Cumberland Plateau would have existed in a state meeting one or more of the definitions of old-growth forest in use today. 

Forest clearing for agricultural and industrial use in the Cumberland Plateau from around the mid-1800s to 1930 left little forest untouched, and only a few examples of relatively intact old-growth forests remain in Kentucky (Jones 2005). However, many recovering, mature forests currently exist that might be redeveloping old-growth structure and function. Many existing old-growth forests are recognized as having initiated following major disturbance (Whitney 1994), and models of forest structural development describe forests as proceeding from a regenerating, even-aged distribution toward a multi-aged, old-growth architecture given sufficient time (Oliver and Larson 1996; Frelich 2002). While the specifics may vary by disturbance intensity, species composition, climate, and edaphic conditions, the natural redevelopment of old-growth forest structure, composition, and processes is expected (Frelich 2002).

The purpose of this investigation was to assess the development of old-growth structural characteristics in some of the oldest second-growth hardwood forests of eastern Kentucky.

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