Big Thicket<\/h3>
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The Big Thicket[3] is the name given to a somewhat imprecise region of a heavily forested area of Southeast Texas in the United States. This area represents a portion of the mixed pine-hardwood forests or \"Piney Woods\" of the Southeast US.[4] The National Park Service established the Big Thicket National Preserve (BTNP) within the region in 1974 and it is recognized as a biosphere reserve by UNESCO. Although the diversity of animals in the area is high for a temperate zone with over 500 vertebrates, it is the complex mosaic of ecosystems and plant diversity that is particularly remarkable. Biologists have identified at least eight, and up to eleven, ecosystems in the Big Thicket area. More than 160 species of trees and shrubs, 800 herbs and vines, and 340 types of grasses are known to occur in the Big Thicket, and estimates as high as over 1000 flowering plant species and 200 trees and shrubs have been made, plus ferns, carnivorous plants, and more. The Big Thicket has historically been the most dense forest region in what is now Texas.[5][6][7][8]<\/p>
Native Americans are known to have lived and hunted in the area nomadically, but did not establish permanent settlements there before the Alabama\u2013Coushatta settled in the northeast about 1780. Spanish explorers and missionaries generally avoided the area and routed their roads around it. Logging in the late 19th and 20th centuries dramatically reduced the forest concentration. Efforts to save the Big Thicket from the devastation of oil and lumber industries started as early as the 1920s with the founding of the East Texas Big Thicket Association by Richard Elmer Jackson.[6][9]<\/p><\/div>\n