If you’ve ever been to Brooklyn Bridge Park, you may have seen the sturdy, wooden-beamed benches facing the harbor. …Its timber comes from the longleaf pine, Pinus palustris, some of which was cut in the decades before 1900. …Geographers… track the demise of the longleaf ecosystem. When Europeans arrived in the southeast, the pines covered the coast plain from what is now the Virginia/North Carolina border into Florida and along the Gulf Coast. Estimates of the total size of this pine savannah range from 60 to 147 million acres. There are far fewer of the trees now, and only a tiny proportion of the remnant is old growth. …Europeans first took the trees for ship masts and naval stores like pitch, tar, and turpentine.