Aerial Photographs

• 2006

  Old Field Plot B (upper right of a group of four plots immediately south of the Phillips Center) was mowed and disked on 6 Nov 2006.

  

• 2000

  Old Field Plot C (lower left of the group of four old-field plots immediately south of the Phillips Center) was started on its first 40-year rotation by double disking on 28 Nov 2000.

  

• 1990

  By 1990, laurel oaks formed a continuous canopy in the undisturbed (and unburned) pineland, shading out the turkey oaks and curtailing the reproduction of longleaf pines. The Performing Arts Center was under construction just north of the future NATL, and, to the east, the Entomology and Nematology Building was nearly complete. The DPI complex had expanded onto 5 acres to the south of its original 10 acres.

  

• 1974

  By 1974, the Florida Department of Agriculture had acquired 10 acres on SW 34th Street and built most of its Division of Plant Industry complex, including the Doyle Conner Building.

  

• 1961

  By 1961, the University had begun to use the northeastern part of the future NATL as a place to spread clay excavated from construction sites. To the southeast, the University had begun to develop the Surge Area, where economical buildings that housed research projects could overflow (“surge”) from the main campus.

  

• 1949

  This picture was taken soon after UF acquired the land. As in the 1937 picture, the hammock occupies the southeastern portion of what will become NATL-west. The rest of the area has no large-crowned trees but numerous longleaf pines of modest size with an understory of scrubby turkey oaks.

  

• 1937

  This, the earliest aerial photograph of NATL, is in poor focus but trees with large crowns are evident in the areas that are now upland pine and old fields. These trees are not evident in the 1949 photograph, which agrees with a conclusion in a 2005 study of the ages of NATL's longleaf pines--namely that in about 1940 the longleaf pines of marketable size were harvested from the area that would become NATL.