By SFC Jason Hull, Public Affairs Office.

Fort Stewart has nearly 280,000 acres of land, much dedicated to training the combat readiness of the 3rd Infantry Division, the armored component forces of America’s contingency corps.

However, the largest military installation east of the Mississippi River is also devoted to environmental conservation and restoration. The installation’s Directorate of Public Works has a department dedicated to managing the land to meet the needs of combat training and preserving the natural spaces.

Biologist Larry Carlile, the Fish and Wildlife Branch chief, manages the hunting and fishing program for the base as well as its conservation and protected species programs. Carlile is also responsible for the Department of Defense’s Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration Program for Fort Stewart-Hunter Army Airfield. Lately, Carlile’s department has received good news about several of the agency’s efforts.

Fort Stewart is home to one of the most diverse ecosystems in the northern hemisphere. The longleaf pine forests, wetlands, and wiregrass savannah are brimming with plants and animals, some of which include threatened or endangered species. According to Carlile, the uniqueness of the coastal Georgian environment is what makes it a perfect home for such a variety of species.

“(Pine wiregrass habitats) even rival tropical rainforest as far as the number of species per square meter,” Carlile said. “So that’s incredible, and it’s just because if you had a closed canopy and everything got shaded out, you would not see that kind of diversity.”

Any soldier stationed in the southeast United States is familiar with the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, as well as the restrictions imposed on military land use as a result. Thanks to the prescribed burn program and the efforts to replenish the population by the Fort Stewart team, conservation efforts for the endangered woodpeckers are a success story and the team has been translocating populations for 30 years to support other dwindling populations across the southeast. Now, they are preparing to translocate some to a new location, the Fred C. Babcock/Cecil M. Webb Wildlife Management Area in Florida, as well as to Sprewell Bluff Park in Georgia. Carlile says they’ll also translocate some woodpeckers for a “jump-started population” near Fort Moore soon.

“Over the years, Fort Stewart has donated, I guess we’re right at 460 birds since 1996 to other populations,” Carlile said. “We usually do between 20 and 30 birds every year.”

The Fish and Wildlife team and the prescribed burn program have also set conditions for expanding the endangered frosted flatwood salamander population. The ephemeral ponds where the amphibians make their home cycle between flooding and drying out depending on the season or weather. Due to drought conditions spanning decades that disrupted the salamanders’ reproduction cycles, the team was concerned about the animals’ genetic diversity. According to Carlile, they’ve recently been told that the Fort Stewart amphibians’ population is the most genetically diverse, which is good news for such a rare and vulnerable species.

“He’s saying that our population is more diverse than the only two other extant populations, one at St Mark’s (Wildlife Refuge) and one at National Forest,” he said.

It’s important to know that these animals and their ecosystem depend on fires to ignite the pine needles and wire grass bunches to clear competing shrubs and hardwood saplings. The wire grass where the salamanders lay their eggs has evolved to require regular burns to thrive.

“It’s got to be burned during the growing season to bloom and produce viable seed,” Carlile said. “These habitats recover very quickly. That wiregrass will be green and an inch long within a week after the fire.”

The team plants about 200 acres of wiregrass a year in places that had been previously developed to restore the historically natural environment. In the past, before urbanization and large-scale logging, lightning strikes would ignite combustible fuel on the ground, reducing the thick undergrowth. Today, Fort Stewart’s DPW conducts controlled burning, which makes training for armored troops possible, but also gives the longleaf pine habitat exactly what it needs to thrive. The pines have thick bark that makes it resistant to fire damage. Coupled with the fast-growing wiregrasses and other native vegetation, it’s the right habitat for the red-cockaded woodpeckers and frosted flatwoods salamander populations to recover their numbers.

Although to some it may seem counterintuitive, the presence of noisy military training and explosions doesn’t appear to have a significant impact on the protected species living on the installation where troops constantly prepare for combat. To support the military’s ability to train effectively, the Fish and Wildlife team works to ensure it remains that way.