Our story: Discovering the future of North America

Our vision began with the realization that the Paint Rock Valley might help us understand the future of North America’s forests — and our own human future, as well.

The southeastern states are the storehouse for eastern North America’s diversity. As climate change and glaciers repeatedly wiped out life on much of the continent, the Deep South protected the seeds that revived those forests, grasslands and streams as climate warmed again. Paint Rock is on the  leading edge of this vital life exchange. It sits in the center of North America’s deciduous forest diversity, its aquatic diversity, its cave diversity. The unusually rich biodiversity and genetic inheritance of this region helps explain the 10,000-year-old human heritage written into the landscape here.

That’s why, in 2007, The Nature Conservancy began working with the world’s leading evolutionary biologists — including UCLA’s Stephen Hubbell, researchers at the Smithsonian Institution, and Harvard’s E.O. Wilson — to develop a research center in Paint Rock. We wanted to better understand and share the story of Southeastern biodiversity so the Southeast could once again share its diversity with the rest of the country as climate changes again.

A decade later, the Paint Rock Forest Research Center non-profit was created and launched the largest forest dynamics study of its kind in North America on The Nature Conservancy’s 4,000-acre Sharp Bingham Preserve, alongside a 20-acre residential campus operated by the Research Center. Other researchers and research followed, and we now facilitate ground-breaking studies in aquatic life, cave-life, bird life, and the restoration of some of the nation’s most important lost ecosystems — shortleaf pine savannas, native bamboo canebrakes, and river-side forests and grasslands. We’re discovered species new to science and rediscovering species once thought extinct.

We recognize the future of those forests is inseparable from people, just as our future is inseparable from the forest. So we began our census in collaboration with Alabama A&M University, training a new and more diverse generation of researchers and students of natural history. Our team now includes faculty and students from University of Alabama, Jacksonville State University, University of Georgia, University of West Alabama, University of Alabama Huntsville and many other regional and national institutions.

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