Help us discover what fills it.
Yes, a tornado slammed into a beautiful, rare and unusually rich Research Center forest on The Nature Conservancy’s Sharp Bingham Preserve May 20th.
F2 ,says weather service, about 185 miles per hour at peak.
We’re safe, the buildings are safe, most of our forest dynamics plot (though not all) escaped. But a swath of forest – 200 or so acres of rich, mature, high canopy trees which had shaded the forest floor for centuries – is now an ugly, broken, sun-burned tangle of trunks.
The amount of damage is, in a word, awesome. We can’t even find the main road in places. Trunks piled on trunks have cut us off from much of our research work, our new species, our caves, our rare plants. We still can’t tell you what came through and what didn’t.
The tornado seemed as surprised to find itself in the midst of Paint Rock’s deep ravines as we were to see it there. After wiping out houses in the flat valleys near Huntsville, it twisted and turned over the steep mountains without doing much damage, then plopped down in the deep, narrow sinks between two ridges. It tried to find its way along our primary road, then started climbing out, zig-zagging across the mountain in a way that did maximal damage to the forest and our access.
And the forest, the forest will never be the same in our lifetimes or our children’s. That’s exactly why we are here.
We don’t waste disasters. They can be opportunities, if we can put the right funds and researchers together. Tornadoes and big wind events are a fact of life here in Alabama, and they have clearly played a significant role in shaping our forests. It’s rare for researchers to have the chance to study the impacts of severe wind damage in a diverse and mature temperate forest. Those studies could produce reams of information on how species like oaks, ash, elms, hickories and shortleaf pine recover and naturally reproduce. It could tell us a lot about how these messy natural gaps have supported rare birds, insects, plants, mammals for millions of years.
Going to take a while to cut through it all. Repair to the road system necessary for our research is going to be expensive—even after cleaning the trees out of the road, we’ve got to repair massive holes where collapsing root wads took the road with them. We need help paying for the clean up.
But more importantly, let’s work together to find a way to get researchers back in this forest so we can monitor its recovery from day one.
You can contribute to our Tornado Recovery and Discovery Fund here. These funds will be used not only for repair, but also for bringing in researchers who can help us turn this tornado into one of the rarest research opportunities in North American forests. We estimate it will cost about $125,000 to do both.
Watch for more information and videos on one of the most breathtaking natural events at Sharp Bingham Preserve in our lifetimes.