You can raise enough money and work with many partners to census some 50,000 trees over more than 80 acres, every stem larger than a pencil identified, measured, geolocated, tagged and followed for 50 years. We already have the most tree-diverse forest dynamics census in North America…we’re now just steps away from having the largest.
You can bring national attention to the genetic threats bearing down on of one of North America’s most endangered forest ecosystems, the shortleaf pine savanna system. You can then collect some 2 million native Cumberland plateau seeds for restoration …the first time that’s been done in a century. You can set up a seed processing center to handle it. And you can start building a collection of native grass and wildflowers seeds that will be critical for savanna restoration.
You can help build a coalition of scientists who plan to make Paint Rock the center of cave research in North America.
You can focus scientists on the naming of multiple species new to science, including massive oaks and maples; spectacularly flowering buckeyes, azaleas, sunflowers, violets; and aquatic snails that likely exist in only one small spring run on Sharp Bingham Preserve.
You can work with U.S. Fish and Wildlife and others to develop an expanded fish and mussel surveying effort in Paint Rock River, one of the richest rivers in the temperate world.
You can begin to catalog thousands of years of human footprints (sometimes literally) in Paint Rock Valley, and work to develop a coalition of researchers who can better explore and understand human history and prehistory.
You can begin building a staff – our science director Ruby Hammond and our grants and operations manager Sarah Pacyna – who are expanding our capacity to do more good work.
You can build a board that will roll up its sleeves and help you accomplish what you need to get done.
You can build a relationship with very supportive donors and our state legislative delegation who help you through the rough spots and set you on a path to long term success.
We celebrated our 5th official year as a non-profit organization this month. Our history goes back farther than that, and we’ll tell that story in coming weeks. Our future prospects are beginning to match our 50-year vision. But boy, we got a lot done in 5 years, and we took some time to enjoy it.
Shortleaf cone harvest at the Jones FarmShortleaf cone harvest at the Jones Farm
We collected 45 bushels of shortleaf pine cones this year — triple the number of bushels collected last year— and that means we’ll have about 2 million seeds squirreled away and ready for restoring shortleaf, hundreds of acres at a time. Many of these seeds will go to restore landscapes in the region, from state lands to Little River Canyon National Preserve. But we didn’t do it because it’s good for Paint Rock, or good for Alabama or the Cumberlands. We did it because native eastern shortleaf and the savanna ecosystems it supports are vitally important to the future of forests throughout eastern North America.
That’s no overstatement. The U.S. Forest Service has identified shortleaf pineas one of the country’s most resilient trees, with excellent potential to not only survive the coming changes in climate, but also to thrive and expand its range in the midst of it. Take a look at these maps from the Forest Service predicting the area where shortleaf could become “important” to forests as climate changes. A hotter climate means that shortleaf could play an increasingly important role even up into New England
I just gave a talk at the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Gardens. No one there knew much about shortleaf pine, even though the area now submerged under Cincinnati’s footprint was clearly once home to shortleaf and likely many of its creatures, including endangered red-cockaded woodpeckers. But they could see the maps, and how important shortleaf is likely to be even in parts of Ohio.
They were very interested in shortleaf’s ability to store carbon, and I reminded them shortleaf had several tricks up its sleeve. Shortleaf is much more tolerant of heat, drought and fire than most trees, and can keep sequestering carbon at a high rate even as climate conditions worsen.
But like the longleaf pine farther south, shortleaf is also the kingpin of a resilient landscape, made up of hundreds of kinds of wildflowers and grasses that are also unusually adept at storing carbon in difficult conditions. It’s a very effective two layer carbon storage system that likely outperforms almost any trees or forest types on the soils where it’s best adapted.
Whether shortleaf actually does get to fill the gaps in our climate distressed forests is another question. For one, we really don’t know whether trees will be able to move fast enough on their own, particularly with sprawling cities and suburbs surrounding Atlanta, Nashville and Huntsville standing in the way. And even more worrisome is the fact that we’ve been losing shortleaf pine genetics at a rapid rate. Trees are increasingly isolated, and misguided efforts to restore shortleaf have led to hybrids that are losing the very qualities we most value in shortleaf.
That’s why we’re proud to put together the biggest package of native Cumberland shortleaf seed in almost a century. And that’s why we’re worried that the 2 million seeds we’ve collected won’t supply even a small fraction of the nation’s future need.
Jeff Bezos funded this project through the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. I hope he appreciates what this effort is really about: it’s not just about planting trees, but about planting the right kind of trees that will help our forests weather the hard times ahead. If the trees we plant can’t tolerate the changes in climate, then it’s pretty clear they’Il not be able to mitigate it either, no matter how many we plant. If you run into him, make sure he understands that.
If you’re interested in the future of forests and want to help us with our shortleaf restoration program, follow us here and give us a holler to discuss how you can help.
When folks see us dangling in mid-air trying to collect shortleaf pine cones, they often look confused.
Shoot, someone says, If I was going to restore the shortleaf forest, I could just go in my yard and pick them up off the ground.
Sure you could. And they may make nice holiday decorations. But they won’t produce seed, and they won’t help us restore shortleaf pine ecosystems
So as gingerly as I can, let me jump in with both feet.
Imagine that we’re the doulas assisting in the birth of a new generation of shortleaf pines.
Cone maturity is a bit like gestation, human, horse or otherwise. The cones, you should recognize, are not the seed, but rather the womb that protects and nourishes the seed. There are about as many seeds developing in a cone as there are prickly tipped scales on the cone. About 25 to 40 of those seeds will eventually reach maturity.
Shortleaf nourish and protect their seed in the womb twice as long as humans do. From the moment of fertilization, it takes about 17 to 18 months for those seed to mature (Yes, the cone crop of fall 2023 started in April of 2022.) So by September of the second year they’ve gone through more than 95% of their gestation period. And just as human babies can usually handle the world pretty well if they’re a few weeks early, so can pine cone seeds.
But wait! Why don’t we just wait until full parturition, when the cones open naturally on the trees? Because young shortleaf seedlings have wings, quite literally. And as soon as the mother cones opens, those seeds do what they’re designed to do, and fly as far from the mother trees as the wind will take them.
The womb the seeds are buried in – i.e., the cones – are actually perfectly designed to facilitate this. The cone starts losing moisture as it nears maturity, the cone scales shrink, and the openings between scales gradually dilate. That our-pouring of shortleaf seed almost always occurs in tandem with the first hard cold fronts. The cold fronts bring the dry air from the continent that teases the cones open, but they also bring something just as important: wind, blowing hard. The cones suddenly gape, the moisture holding the seed in place evaporates, and the seeds are loosed to the winds. A month after the cones start opening, some 80 to 90 percent of the seeds will have flown the coop. And in a forest, there’s just no practical way to gather the seeds once they’ve left the cones.
Another peculiar thing about shortleaf: Most trees are loaded with cones. But almost all of those cones are spent cones from years past. The only cones that still have seed are the small fraction of green cones at the very tips of the branches.
So we, the shortleaf doulas, try to gauge when the seeds have reached full maturity – that is, when they’re ripe enough to survive and grow well on their own, And we pick the cones while they are still green. If we picked too early, in August or early September, research suggests some of the seeds may not yet be fully viable. Even more of problem may be the womb itself, the cone: It simply doesn’t dry properly if picked too early, and thus may not open sufficiently to release seed.
So we use a variety of tools – the weight of the cones (do they float in 20 weight motor oil?), the color of the cones, and whatever experience with past cone crops we can find – to determine when they are most likely to be viable. Drought, excess rain, humidity, cold, heat, stress, pavement, shade – they all play a role in the precise maturity of each cone, though honestly it’s sometimes hard to figure out how all of these variables come together. And even on a single tree, some cones may mature well before others.
But in general, we try to start harvesting a few weeks before the cones typically start opening. And then we climb up in the bucket or raise our electrician’s poles as high in the trees as we can to clip off those green cones.
Since we’ve been shortleaf doulas for only a couple of years…and since we’ve been unable to find other eastern shortleaf doulas out there willing to take this on or give us much advice…we’re still learning a lot about when precisely to time our intervention in this birthing process. We’ve assumed that mid-October was a reasonable time to start collecting, under the assumption that most cones wouldn’t open until the second week in November.
But for the past two years, we’ve seen some cones opening by the last week in October, and a lot of cones opening the first week of November. So our advice to other aspiring shortleaf doulas: We think it will generally be better to start harvest of eastern shortleaf cones as early in October as possible, and in coming years, if our funding continues to allow us to collect, that’s what we’ll do. That should also greatly increase our harvest potential each year. This year, we lost a lot of the potential cone crop simply because so many cones opened earlier than anticipated.
If you’d like to become a certified shortleaf doula, give us a holler. We’d love to train a new generation to assist in the rebirth of the shortleaf forest.
What a way and a day to start the 2023 shortleaf pine seed harvest – on the celebrated 2400-acre Jones Farm in Huntsville, with a haul of pine cones that almost equalled the total number of cones collected all of last year.
If you’re wondering what the fuss is about pine cones, I reckon you missed the part about us getting a National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant to help restore one of the Southeast’s most endangered forest types, the shortleaf pine forest. Unlike loblolly pine, which was yanked out of the moist coves and forced to pave industrial forests all across the state, shortleaf pine helped manage and oversee a massive ecosystem of grasses and wildflowers that spread over much of the Cumberland Mountains. It was a cornerstone for our once rich populations of quail, grouse, elk, turkey and many other creatures.
But it has become exceedingly rare, and misguided attempts to restore it are actually threatening its existence. That’s because there’s been no source of seed for Alabama and Tennessee. And people have been resorting to the Arkansas nursery version of shortleaf, which is genetically a distant cousin and is notorious for promoting hybrids that undermine the very reasons for planting shortleaf in the first place. So, where angels fear to tread: We decided we had to do something to supply native shortleaf seed to Alabama and Tennessee forests for the first time in almost a century. Last year was our crash course in how to collect shortleaf seed, and our only real instructors were the shortleaf and Robert Gandy, Alabama’s most illustrious tree seed collector. But we did far better than we anticipated, collecting almost half a million seed.
This year, the shortleaf had a few more things to teach us, and it all started with the Jones Farm. A bumper crop collection of seed last year was three or four bushels of cones. But at the Jones Farm, we hauled in almost 10 bushels in one day, thanks to the hard and generous work of Nick Poppe and crew at Steadfast Tree Service – and to the healthy and fecund shortleaf there and the families that protected those trees all these years. Before it was over, we attracted the attention of forester and social media personality Kyle Lybarger and his partner Jake Brown, who featured the event on one of their Native Habitat segments. Carter England put us on to these trees, and even showed us aerial photos of the trees dating back deep into the last century. Amazing all that they have survived, and won’t it be good to know that this important last piece of Huntsville’s once abundant forest system can be preserved and transplanted to the rest of the Cumberlands?
