You spend the money, take the time and effort, then you have your seedlings in the ground ready to start their growth into tall and hardy trees. However, as it’s liable to do, the weather turns poor and you get a severe drought, like the one that started in 2025 and carried into spring 2026.
“Landowners reported that the extreme drought conditions that occurred in the fall of 2025 and spring of 2026 was killing newly planted seedlings,” said Jason Vogel, associate professor with the UF School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences (SFFGS). “With my colleagues (SFFGS Associate Professor) Dan Johnson and (Agronomy Department Plant Ecophysiologist) Bill Hammond, we wrote a proposal to identify what areas are most likely to have experienced high mortality so that landowners can check if they need to replant.”
The project resulting from the proposal recently received a grant of nearly $300,000 from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), to address the issue.
“An extreme drought in the southeastern United States is threatening newly planted pine tree seedlings, creating financial risks for forest landowners and a timber industry that supports over 1 million jobs and $400 billion in economic output,” according to the project summary submitted to NIFA.
“To address this threat, this project aims to quantify drought risks in real time, identify heat and drought limits for popular pine varieties, and create easy-to-use forecasting tools so landowners can make informed management decisions to protect their investments.”
The project team will create mapping tools using weather and soil data, monitoring soil moisture in over 40 real-world pine plantations, testing seedling survival under extreme heat and drought conditions in the lab, and sharing best practices through online workshops, published documents, and in-person presentations.
“Ultimately, researchers expect to produce dynamic soil-moisture models, identify the hardiest pine seedling lines, and release an interactive online map tool that predicts seedling death risks across the region,” according to the project summary.
“By giving landowners early warnings and practical strategies to prevent seedling losses, this work will protect timber-dependent rural economies and build long-term resilience against recurring multi-year droughts.”
The grant, which comes in at $299,718, is one of a pair NIFA funded through the Rapid Response to Weather Events Across Food and Agriculture Systems program recently. The other, at a round $300,000, went to a University of Hawai’i project that’s similar to Vogel’s, but geared toward flooding instead of drought.
“Rapid responses to weather events are critical to maintaining a secure, accessible, safe, nutritious, affordable and abundant food supply,” according to a NIFA statement released with the grant awards. “Innovative Extension and applied research efforts are needed to alleviate the impacts of weather events and disasters across the food and agricultural system.
“The Rapid Response to Weather Events program, funded through the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative, is designed to rapidly deploy strategies and fill knowledge and information gaps to protect the nation’s food and agricultural supply chains — from production through consumption — during and after weather events and disasters.”
Meanwhile, Vogel’s research team is looking for landowners to participate. For those who have land in Florida, Georgia, or Alabama, and would be willing to grant his team access, UF/IFAS will provide, free of charge, measurements of survival on pine seedlings planted during this most recent season, soil nutrient and moisture availability estimates, and an assessment of factors that might have affected seedling survival.
The goal is to provide forest landowners and managers with predictions of pine tree survival under different drought and management conditions. Those interested should email Vogel at jvogel@ufl.edu.
NIFA Project Award No. 2026-68019-46679
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