Seeds of Change
The Nature Conservancy assesses 2025’s longleaf pine seed crop.
On a steamy morning in late July, Tareesa Sevilla stood in a field of wildflowers and aimed her binoculars toward a cluster of longleaf pine trees, some stretching 60 to 100 feet into the blue sky. Sevilla, The Nature Conservancy’s Louisiana land steward, had come to TNC's Persimmon Gully Preserve to count pine cones, a simple task with potentially big implications.
Persimmon Gully is a treasure of a place, home to some longleaf trees estimated to be up to 300 years old. After steering her four-wheeler deep into the forest and then trekking on foot to a sun-dappled meadow, Sevilla hoped to learn if Persimmon Gully’s trees were making enough babies.
Depending on data
This year, Sevilla is among staff in Louisiana, Alabama and Texas who took part in TNC’s first longleaf pine cone count. The data helped shed light on the health of this year’s seed crop.
Ideally, nurseries that grow seedlings for longleaf reforestation projects maintain a three-year inventory of seeds. But in the longleaf restoration community, there was a worry this year: would the trees produce enough cones? And if they didn’t, how would that impact future planting projects?
TNC is working alongside partners to restore longleaf ecosystems and protect the rare plants and animals they support — gopher tortoises, red-cockaded woodpeckers and hooded pitcher plants among them. TNC and America’s Longleaf Restoration Initiative have a shared goal to restore eight million acres of longleaf habitat across the Southeastern United States.
Though the initial outlook for 2025’s longleaf crop was worrisome, Colette DeGarady, director of TNC’s Longleaf Pine Whole System, got some reassuring news in November. About 16,500 pounds of longleaf seeds were collected at sites across the South this fall, according to the Longleaf Partnership Council. This amount “will enable successful planting projects in the 2026-2027 planting season and some additional seed storage,” DeGarady says.
Aiding local foresters
For many years, foresters, researchers and land managers have counted the number of green pine cones produced by mature longleaf trees at public and private sites across the South for the U.S.D.A. Forest Service. The data helps forestry managers and tree nurseries better understand the trees’ biology, gain insight into the quality of the current seed crop and explore the role that climate plays in these trees’ reproduction.
Longleaf forests once ranged more than 90 million acres across the Southern United States. Today there are just 5.2 million acres left. These forests are critically important for their abundant biodiversity, providing habitat for many threatened and endangered species.
Longleaf cone crops have been poor across the South for several years in a row, according to the Forest Service. More than other southern yellow pine species, longleaf seed productivity is influenced by environmental factors over the two-year period it takes for cones to develop, said Will deGravelles, TNC’s director of land protection in Louisiana.
Separate from TNC’s pine cone count, the U.S. Forest Service and its partners also sample cones at 10 locations in the Southeast. This year, six of the 10 sites were projected to have a failed crop, with estimates of around four cones per tree. Three sites were projected to have a fair crop, estimating at 27 cones per tree, and one was predicted to have a poor crop, estimated at 18 cones per tree, according to an article by Ad Platt of the Longleaf Alliance, citing the 2025 Longleaf Pine Cone Prospects Report. The last good crops recorded in some locations occurred in 2022.
Counting on TNC preserves
Persimmon Gully Preserve hosts a pine flatwoods habitat notable for its rare sodic soils (sodic means high in sodium) and ancient longleaf pine trees, making it the perfect spot to count pine cones. Following survey guidelines, Sevilla identified a cluster of trees and then focused her binoculars on the branches, methodically working her way to the top of one side and then down the other. The final count: just two longleaf trees had about five to six green cones each.
A dearth of cones, though, doesn’t necessarily mean the trees aren’t healthy. As a “masting” species, longleaf pines vary the number of seeds they produce annually, with some years yielding large crops and others very few. What influences the number of seeds is being studied by scientists. Preliminary research in one study, for example, found that “cone production increased by 31 percent in the first year after a hurricane and 71 percent higher in the second year, before returning to pre-storm levels in year three,” according to USDA.gov.
Longleaf trees are prone to “boom or bust” years in cone production regionally, deGravelles said. “But even in a bad year, there is usually a good crop somewhere. However, that has not been the case the last two years,” he said. “Nurseries rely heavily on seed orchards where longleaf are grown specifically for seed production, but these trees are also susceptible to variability. In many years, they must supplement this with wild-collected seed.”
A failed crop is what TNC’s Alabama Director of Forest Programs Davis Goode, Restoration Ecologist Geoff Sorrell, and Conservation Forester Nathan Mercer found at the Roberta Case Pine Hills Preserve when they participated in TNC’s pine cone count. While Goode wasn’t overly concerned about the diminished seed production there, he says the issue has prompted his team to adjust its planning for future planting projects.
TNC’s Alabama staff will plant 66,000 longleaf seedlings on 106 acres this winter at the Cahaba River National Wildlife Refuge, a project in partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “We reserved the seedlings last spring,” Goode says. “We are having to think about our planting projects well in advance and get on the (nursery’s) list earlier than we would have before.”
Back in Louisiana, deGravelles also was watching the cone count data this year. “In the short run, we are not worried about regeneration at Persimmon Gully,” he says, explaining that TNC planted seedlings two years ago to supplement the preserve’s natural regeneration.
In early 2026, DeGarady will begin a project to plant 2.2 million longleaf seedlings in Alabama, Georgia and the panhandle of Florida. The nursery that germinated the seeds for the project “had to go into its reserves” in cold storage to provide enough seeds for the project, she says.
“Thankfully the seed reserves had sufficient germination to cover this coming planting season and this year’s collection will help with future planting projects,” she says.
More About Longleaf Pine Cones
Keeping an eye on biodiversity
In fiscal year 2024, more than 100,000 acres of longleaf were planted across the Southern U.S., representing millions of seedlings. Essentially all of these seedlings came from nurseries which get their seeds from orchards or wild collected. More than 6,600 acres of plantings took place in Louisiana alone.
In future years, if TNC’s preserves produce a bumper crop (more than 100 cones per tree) or a good crop (50 to 99 cones per tree), TNC could hire a contractor to collect cones, DeGarady says, noting that TNC is one of the largest private owners and managers of longleaf pine forests. If needed to boost supplies, the seeds collected at TNC’s preserves could go to a nursery for germination or for reserves.
“We want to leverage our preserves to provide any support we can,” Goode says, adding that “the big issue is also to maintain the ecological integrity of our preserves.”
Looking ahead
This year’s pine cones fell from the trees in October and November. Predictions for next year are looking hopeful. “A very good conelet crop is developing for 2026,” reported Ad Platt, vice president of operations for the Longleaf Alliance. “This is not surprising since cone production is strongly correlated to follow two years after hurricanes, and the 2024 hurricane season was very active.”
Help us restore longleaf pine trees across their original range throughout the Southern U.S.
Contact TNC's Louisiana Director of Philanthropy, Celeste Richard (celeste.richard@tnc.org or 225-338-1040), to learn more.
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