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In the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, feral hogs work soybean fields, rice levees, and shrinking bottomland hardwood remnants along the Louisiana black bear's recolonization corridor. Two hundred miles south, the same species roots through longleaf pine restoration plots and listed-species habitat on DeSoto National Forest. One state, two invasions, one management arithmetic.

From the rice levees of Vermilion Parish to the fraying marsh edges of Cameron Parish, feral hogs occupy the seam between farmland and wetland. Their rooting threatens both a rice economy that feeds millions of wintering waterfowl and a coastline already losing ground to the Gulf.

The Atchafalaya Basin is the largest bottomland hardwood swamp left in North America, and one of the most feral-hog-saturated landscapes in the country. Here, dense cover and near-impossible access have turned a management problem into something closer to a permanent ecological condition.

Across the pine plantations and peanut fields of Telfair and Berrien Counties, feral hogs are rooting through the same wiregrass understory that decades of prescribed fire and habitat investment built for wild bobwhite quail. Here is how the invasion intersects with Georgia's private-lands quail tradition.

In Georgia's lower Coastal Plain, the wild hog has reached one of North America's great wetlands: the Okefenokee, a vast rain-fed peat swamp, and the blackwater rivers around it. This synthesis follows the hog onto the swamp's tree islands, into its alligator nests, and down the bottomland corridors: what rooting does to the peat, the alligators, and the swamp's rare wildlife, and why a federal Wilderness is such hard ground to defend.

On Florida's north-central public lands, the wild hog meets a paradox: the Ocala and Osceola national forests and surrounding state lands hold the large, contiguous habitat imperiled wildlife needs, yet open access and limits on lethal control make hogs harder to remove than on private ground. This synthesis follows the hog across the Big Scrub, the longleaf flatwoods, and the springs, and asks why fighting it on public land is so hard.

In the cattle country west of Lake Okeechobee, in the very headwaters of the Everglades, Florida carries one of the densest feral-hog populations in the nation, second only to Texas. This synthesis follows the wild hog into the Central Ranch Belt: how rooting degrades the dry-prairie wetlands that feed Lake Okeechobee, how it threatens imperiled prairie wildlife from the sandhill crane to the crested caracara, and how the hog sits at a disease fence line with a major cattle i

In the Arkansas Delta, an invasive land mammal is colliding with a continental migratory-bird resource. The Grand Prairie around Stuttgart, the Mississippi Flyway's premier duck-wintering ground, runs on rice and managed moist-soil wetlands, and feral hogs root up both. This covers that collision: how rooting destroys the waterfowl food base the refuges cultivate, the cost to farmers, and why Arkansas, still on the invasion's leading edge, may be one of the few places it can

The Alabama Wiregrass is the front line of the Southeast's most important habitat-restoration effort, rebuilding the longleaf pine savanna, and feral hogs are its single most damaging enemy. This synthesis follows the wild hog into the Wiregrass longleaf country along the Florida line: how rooting destroys grass-stage seedlings and the slow-growing wiregrass, how hogs threaten the keystone gopher tortoise, and why a population that crosses the state line defeats single-state

The same rich soil that made the Alabama Black Belt the antebellum cotton kingdom now feeds one of the densest wild hog invasions in the South, and the vast Mobile-Tensaw Delta gives the hogs a near-impenetrable refuge. This synthesis applies the invasion-biology lens to one landscape: why the Black Belt's chalk-soil farmland and river bottoms are so vulnerable, how the delta's swamp defeats control, and what the hogs do to the forests, the cane, the mast, and the native wild

A misfolded protein is moving through the Southeast's deer herds, and it cannot be cured or burned out of the soil. Chronic Wasting Disease, the always-fatal prion disease of deer, has spread from West Virginia and Virginia into Tennessee, Mississippi, and the Carolinas. This synthesis covers the science: how the prions work and persist, how it reached the region, what it means for deer and other cervids, and why managing it is as much a social problem as a biological one.

The sporting plantations of the Deep South have done what almost no other private land has: kept the fire-maintained longleaf pine ecosystem alive. This synthesis covers the ecology of the Southern quail plantation — the Red Hills as the largest privately owned stand of fire-managed longleaf, the prescribed fire that builds one of North America's most diverse plant communities, bobwhite quail as the flagship, the wildlife it shelters, and the economics behind it all.

Look past the shooting stations and a sporting clays course is often something else: a working landscape. Many Southern clays venues — especially those tied to plantations and preserves — sit on land managed with prescribed fire, native grasses, and longleaf pine. This synthesis reads the upland ecology beneath them: the fire-built longleaf savanna, the bunchgrass fields, the bobwhite and turkey they hold, and the working-lands conservation that shooting helps fund.

The water a kayak can reach — ankle-deep tidal creeks, grass flats, and cypress backwaters — is some of the most ecologically important in the Southeast. The shallows are the nursery for young redfish, seatrout, and flounder, the refuge from bigger predators, and the marsh edge where the food web turns over. This synthesis covers the shallow-water ecology of the region's most accessible waters: the habitats, the fish, and why these zones are first lost to bulkheads, boat wake

Off the Southeast's beaches the water turns blue, and a different ecosystem takes over. This synthesis covers the offshore and bluewater habitats of the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic: the Loop Current and Gulf Stream that act as warm-water highways, the Sargassum weed lines that nurse young fish, the oil platforms and artificial reefs that concentrate life, and the billfish, tuna, mahi, and reef fish that live there — plus the fishery management that governs them.

No animal is remaking the Southeast faster than the wild hog. Descended from Spanish colonial livestock and Eurasian wild boar stocked for hunting, feral Sus scrofa now numbers in the millions — rooting up farmland and forest, eating the eggs of ground-nesting birds, and carrying disease. This synthesis covers the invasion biology: where the hogs came from, why their breeding makes them impossible to remove, the damage they do, and the choice between eradication and endless c

The Southeast holds cold water in a warm region two ways: in the high Appalachian headwaters where native brook trout survive, and in the artificial tailwaters below big dams, where cold bottom-release water grows rainbow and brown trout far south of their natural range. This synthesis covers both coldwater worlds — the engineered tailwater, the imperiled native brook char, the introduced trout that displaced it, the invertebrate food base, and the restoration holding the lin

The striped bass leads a double life in the Southeast. It is a native anadromous fish — an ocean migrant that runs up coastal rivers to spawn — and a stocked reservoir transplant that cannot reproduce in the lakes it now anchors. This synthesis covers both: the spawning ecology, the thermal-oxygen squeeze of a cool-water fish in warm reservoirs, the landlocked populations and their hybrid, and a split conservation story — a coastal stock in trouble and a hatchery-built reserv

The black bass of the Southeast — largemouth, smallmouth, spotted, and Alabama bass — divide the region's freshwaters by temperature, clarity, and current: largemouth in warm vegetated lowlands, smallmouth in cool clear rock, spotted and Alabama bass in between. This synthesis covers the genus's taxonomic upheaval, how the species partition habitat, the reservoir-and-shad food system, nest-guarding reproduction, and the Alabama bass invasion erasing native smallmouth.

The estuaries of the Southeast — from the Chesapeake Bay to the Texas Laguna Madre, across more than 30,000 miles of tidal shoreline — are among the most productive ecosystems on Earth, the nursery for most of the region's coastal fish and shellfish. This synthesis covers the inshore-saltwater system: the marsh-grass detrital engine that feeds it, the three kinds of estuary, the marsh-mangrove-seagrass-oyster habitats, the keystone species, and the threats reshaping the coast