Where: Southeastern United States

What's at stake: Intact native hardwood forests, mountains and stream headwaters

Threatened by: Mountaintop removal coal mining and logging to make disposable paper products

Animals include: Cougars, red-shouldered hawks, songbirds, dusky and green salamanders

• While shortleaf and Virginia pine are native to the Cumberland Plateau, hardwoods such as oak and hickory have long dominated the area's old-growth forests. Loblolly pine, which was introduced to the plateau in the mid-1990s by paper companies and now grows abundantly on local tree plantations, is highly vulnerable to blight.
• Each spring, millions of birds migrating northward from South America or the Caribbean descend on the forests of the Cumberland Plateau before pushing on to Canada's boreal forest.
• The hard mast acorns of the mature oak tree are a keystone resource in the Cumberland Plateau food web. As clearcut logging wipes out these nuts, hundreds of wildlife species are finding it harder to survive.
• Between 1992 and 2002, surface coal mining in the plateau's Appalachian region damaged or destroyed more than 1,200 miles of streams and deforested some 380,000 acres, with valley fills covering more than 83,000 acres and affecting the drainage of some 438,000 acres of watershed.
• The area covered by flattened mountaintops in Appalachia will soon equal the size of Delaware-1.4 million acres. The Cumberland Plateau watershed serves as the headwaters for the Tennessee River, the Elk River, the Duck River, the Sequatchie River, the Paint Rock River and the Collins River.
• Researchers continue to discover new species on the Cumberland Plateau. The Cumberland dusky salamander ( Desmognathus abditus ) got its species name, "abditus" (Latin for "hidden"), because it eluded science for so long.
• The Cumberland Plateau region hosts the richest concentration of salamanders, including the endangered green salamander, of any temperate zone in the world.