Plants of Kennesaw Mountain: A 2021 Vegetation Baseline

Plants shape how an ecosystem works, feed and shelter wildlife, and are usually what draws people outdoors in the first place. To track how park vegetation changes — and what stresses it — the National Park Service's Southeast Coast Network monitors permanent plots across its parks. In 2021 it set up its first plots at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park in Georgia.

Vegetation plots established in July–August 2021. Image from the National Park Service's resource brief on Kennesaw Mountain vegetation monitoring.

The park

Kennesaw Mountain is a 2,923-acre (1,183-hectare) urban park in Cobb County, about 20 miles northwest of Atlanta. Drawing close to 1.5 million visitors a year, it is the second-most visited national battlefield in the country, and it was Georgia's first designated Globally Important Bird Area.

Its forests are mostly early- to mid-successional pine, oak and mixed hardwood, with wetlands along Noses Creek and smaller streams. The upper slopes of Kennesaw and Little Kennesaw Mountains hold a patchwork of glades and open woodlands with stunted, widely spaced trees on thin, rocky soil beside bare rock. That soil lies over both acidic rock (granite gneiss) and basic rock (amphibolite), producing an unusual mix of plants suited to each.

The park sits in the Southern Inner Piedmont, higher and steeper than the rest of the Piedmont, with nutrient-poor, acidic soils. Like most of the region, its land was cleared for farming and timber after European settlement, and the last century of urban growth around it has added pressure — likely spreading invasive plants and making it harder to use fire to restore natural processes. White-tailed deer are dense in Cobb County, and signs of heavy browsing were found throughout the park's upland forests.

How it's measured

Plots are placed randomly within broad habitat types, focusing on those covering more than 30% of a park. In each, crews record the richness and abundance of all plant species, native and non-native; the size, density and health of woody plants; forest floor fuels; disturbances such as insect pests and disease; and physical conditions such as landform, soil nutrients and canopy. The protocol follows the approach of the Carolina Vegetation Survey. At Kennesaw, 14 plots were set up in two habitats: Piedmont open uplands and woodlands, and Piedmont upland forests and shrublands.

What they found

• 184 plant species in all, including 27 not found in earlier surveys.
• Species per plot ranged from 44 to 63 in open uplands and woodlands, and 27 to 56 in upland forests. Diversity was highest among herbaceous plants in open uplands and among trees in the forests.

Average species richness by plant growth form and habitat. Image from the National Park Service's resource brief.

• Invasive plants were everywhere. Non-native species turned up in every plot, including 14 ranked invasive by the Georgia Exotic Pest Plant Council. Chinese privet (Ligustrum sinense), a Category 1 invasive, dominated the seedlings in open upland plots; Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) and Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum) were also common.
• Two rare plants listed as special concern by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources grew in open upland plots: Missouri rock cress (Boechera missouriensis) and Stone Mountain mint (Pycnanthemum curvipes).
• Ash in trouble. Of 13 tree-sized white ash measured, two were dead and four unhealthy. The emerald ash borer has been found in Cobb County, but it's not clear whether it, soil conditions or something else is behind the decline.

Native versus non-native species by habitat. Image from the National Park Service's resource brief.

All plots are scheduled to be resurveyed in spring and summer 2025. The full data summary is available.

About Vital Signs monitoring

The Park Service began its Vital Signs Monitoring program in 1999 so that more than 270 parks could track their highest-priority measures of resource condition — to learn the status and trends of park ecosystems, give early warning of problems, and judge how well management is sustaining them.

Sources

Based on "Terrestrial Vegetation Monitoring 2021 Data Summary for Kennesaw Mountain NBP," Southeast Coast Network, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.