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Line 18: }} The '''Big Thicket'''<ref>{{Cite web\|url=https://texasarchive.org/2012_00165\|title=Sam Houston State University Archives Collection - The Big Thicket\|website=Texas Archive of the Moving Image\|access-date=December 2, 2019}}</ref> is the name given to a somewhat imprecise region of a heavily -forested area inof [[Southeast Texas]] in the United States. It is a highly biodiverse area for a [[temperate]] region, ~~that~~which has been described as "America's Ark" and the "Biological Crossroads of North America".<ref name="Peacock, Howard (1994)">Peacock, Howard (1994) ''Nature Lover's Guide to the Big Thicket''. Texas A&M. University Press. College Station, Texas. 169 pp. {{ISBN\|0-89096-589-7}}</ref> The National Park Service established the '''Big Thicket National Preserve''' ('''BTNP''') within the region in 1974 and it is recognized as a [[Man and the Biosphere Programme\|biosphere reserve]] by [[UNESCO]]. Although the diversity of animals in the area is high, 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.<ref name="Peacock, Howard (1994)" /><ref name="Ajilvsgi (1979)">Ajilvsgi, Geyata (1979) ''Wild Flowers of the Big Thicket: East Texas, and Western Louisiana''. Texas A&M University Press. College Station, Texas 361 pp. {{ISBN\|0-89096-064-X}}</ref><ref name="National Parks: BTNP">National Park Service: [https://www.nps.gov/bith/index.htm Big Thicket National Preserve]</ref><ref name="NPS: Big Thicket Plants">National Park Service: [https://www.nps.gov/bith/learn/nature/plants.htm Big Thicket, Plants]. (Accessed 22 December 2019)</ref> Native Americans are known to have lived and hunted in the area nomadically, but did not establish permanent settlements there before the [[Alabama–Coushatta Tribe of Texas\|Alabama–Coushatta]] settled in the northeast about 1780. Spanish explorers and missionaries generally avoided the area and routed their roads around it. Logging in the late nineteenth and twentieth 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.<ref name="Ajilvsgi (1979)" /><ref name="HOT: Big Thicket">{{cite Handbook of Texas \|title=Big Thicket \|id=gkb03\|last=Abernethy\|first=Francis E. \| date=June 12, 2010}}</ref> In recent years, claims of the Big Thicket's position as a "biological crossroads" and its uniqueness have been called into question by some, arguing that the same habitat that occurs in Southeast Texas extends into Louisiana and eastward; however the importance of saving a representative sample of the Big Thicket was not questioned and regarded as something "for which we must be eternally grateful" by the same authors.<ref>MacRoberts, Michael H. and Barbara R. MacRoberts (2004) [https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2408&context=ethj The Big Thicket: Typical or Atypical? ''East Texas Historical Journal'', 42(1): 42–51]. (Accessed 22 December 2019)</ref>

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