Author Archives: admin

Art sometimes goes where science fears to tread

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Bryce Lafferty, head of the art and design program at Jacksonville State University,
and JSU photography professor Doug Clark are giving a face and voice to the Paint
Rock forest and its inhabitants — from the vibrant moss growing on the edge of
sandstone cliffs to small owls tucked in the crevices of hidden caves.


Lafferty is increasingly recognized for his unusual landscape representations, which
slice into the heart of the land and the ecosystems he paints. Clark is a landscape
photographer who’s working at many scales, capturing forests of mosses or trees.
But their tour wasn’t just about what they see: They’re scouting the preserve for
inspiring places that encourage developing student artists to express their own
interpretations of how art and science collide.

Lafferty and Clark began their explorations in the soaring cave behind the research
center’s main residential building. A steady stream of water rolls from the back of the
cave and out the entrance, echoing off the rock walls, trickling past boulders that pile
up on the slope of the mountain. This would be a great introduction for artists, both
agreed.

After a long buggy trip deep into the 4000-acre preserve, they settled into a large
sink, the local name for a collapsed cave system. The artists couldn’t take their eyes
off the ornate limestone walls, but they got a crash course in dendrology, learning
about the various tree species discovered in the forest dynamics census taking
place on the preserve.

We advanced further into the forest, climbing in elevation to a breathtaking view that
overlooks the preserve. Growing on the cliffs are striking patches of moss, soft
enough to lay on and too vividly green to ignore. They, of course, stole the attention
of each person with a camera and Clark used the photo shoot as an opportunity to
teach the group techniques for achieving quality images in nature.

As we began losing daylight we trekked to a vast, stunning holler, cloaked by
massive trees. Fallen timber was a bridge over the waterfalls rushing below. We
photographed until everyone’s batteries bit the dust. Clark came prepared and had
another camera handy. We capitalized on this and headed toward our last
destination of the day.


As we bounced around in the buggy, descending down the mountain, we discussed
the future and vision that they had for the fine arts program at JSU. We kicked
around some ways that Paint Rock can help them present their ideas of intertwining
science and art in expressions that can be enjoyed by the public.

We finally pulled off of the gravel road and weaved our way through trees and tall
grass to get to the last spot: an old cave with a fascinating history. The deep cavern
had served as a concert venue for bluegrass bands in its past, and additionally as a
fallout shelter in case of a nuclear attack. Now the cavity is simply a home to those
creatures who’d rather not be seen by the world. We ran into one of these shy souls
when we came upon a small screech owl staring right at us. As a reminder of his
talent for stealth, the petite predator practically disappeared before our eyes, exiting
our view just as quickly as he had entered it.

Wrapping up, we could all agree that the day owed us nothing. By the time we
parted ways our camera rolls were full, and intentions were laid out for what looks to
be a bright future in the way of relations between Paint Rock and the fine arts
program of Jacksonville State University.


— Sakora Smeby with Bill Finch

Canned restoration is undermining our ecosystems…and that’s why we start with the seed

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Too many people assume restoration of our forests, meadows and streams is something you can buy off-the-shelf at Walmart.

Oh, you want a wildflower meadow? Surely all you need to do is buy a can of it on the internet, and voila, we have it all back again. Just heat and serve, like it was a tin of baked beans. But the canned approach often does more harm than good – introducing invasive plants and genetics that can undermine the very communities we claim to save.

One of the biggest impediments to restoration efforts in Alabama is that we simply don’t have the most important ingredient – the seed. Sure you can find seed of native plants from Minnesota, California, Texas…but those plants are often just as alien to Alabama as plants from Europe or China. They often fail to thrive in our conditions, and even when they do, they can threaten the complex interactions of other plants, insects or animals around them.

That’s why, when we realized how important it was to restore shortleaf pine – the cornerstone of the South’s once immense shortleaf pine savannas – we knew we had to start with the seed. No one had collected shortleaf seed in Alabama in almost a century, and all the shortleaf seed being used for restoration here came from well west of the Mississippi River. Rather than restoring Alabama shortleaf pine, those western seeds undermine its future.

But as we learned, there’s more to seed than just collecting it. You have to figure out how to get it out of the fruit or cone that carries it – without losing it all together. You have to clip off the excess and separate the living kernel from the trash that comes with it. And then you’ve got to prove to the big growers that your seed is as pure and ready to germinate as any seed on the market.

Much to our delight, Robert Gandy, an esteemed seed collector with an impressive work history, found himself coming out of retirement to help with the endeavor we have embarked on at Paint Rock— to produce healthy, native shortleaf pine trees. Gandy got his start working with the Peace Corps in Central America, and went on to be recognized as one of the top seed procurers for the forest industry in the southeast. 

Using his experience, Robert designed our seed processing equipment almost from scratch. When something didn’t work, he rebuilt it until it did. Pieces of those early trial runs are still in our garage – but they’re so cool, we don’t want to get rid of them. 

For our 2022 seed harvest, Robert created a machine that would help dry out and open up the cones. Each batch of cones can take days to dry properly, and it takes quite a bit of baby-sitting to make sure the cones are ready to give up all their seed. Once dry and fully open, the cones are shaken and spun vigorously in another machine. The collected seeds have their wings clipped with another device (we don’t want them to fly away, obviously). And then they get their last shakedown and cleaning in a century old seed cleaner called the Clipper, which Robert acquired years ago and offered to the Research Center. It’s such a large and impressive set-up, Robert felt it best to operate it from the garage of his house in Gardendale, which basically meant that Robert did most or all of the seed cleaning work in the first year, producing almost half a million seed. 

But this year, we made the big move to Paint Rock, and some of you might have seen the equipment on display at our open house in November. Robert worked closely with our research team leader, Joao Pedro de Godoy, to make sure he knew all the nuances of operating the machinery, and Joao has already successfully processed several bushels of cones. 

Robert is always improving on his design, and with our bumper crop of seed this year, he decided we needed to make some significant upgrades. So the mastermind has brought forth a new contraption meant to more efficiently separate the seeds from the wings, speeding up this lengthy stage of the restoration procedure.

Robert’s newest gadget fits in well with the Steampunk theme of our seed operation. It’s a bright orange cement mixer that has been modified to toss the seeds until the wings break off. They then go to the Clipper, which neatly separates any remaining excess material from the PLS (Pure Live Seed) leaving us with just what we need: usable seeds for planting.

Robert doesn’t cut corners, and neither do we when it comes to restoring Alabama ecosystems.

Sakora Smeby and Bill Finch

A 120-year-old book connects us with Alabama’s past and future

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A hidden text in an old book reminds us of why we’re here.

It’s a wonder that a state with so much biodiversity isn’t also considered
a leader in the study of that diversity.

But oddly, in the early 20th century, it was — in large measure because
of the efforts of a German-born amateur botanist, Charles Mohr. In the
1850s, after travels through Europe, New England, California, Mexico
and a number of tropical countries, Mohr opened up a pharmacy in
Mobile. A pharmacist in those days wasn’t so much a pill pusher, but a
compounder of herbs whose success often rested on a knowledge of
local plants. Mohr took that plant knowledge to a new level, and
produced what has to be considered the first great comprehensive
state botany, which became a model for botanists in other states.

Mohr’s Plant Life of Alabama, published in 1901, is now a treasure for
botanists studying the Southeast. Mohr’s work was so revered that his
name was attached to many Southeastern species – I remember him
every time I see the distinctive moon-yellow flowers of
Silphium mohrii, a species almost entirely restricted to northeast Alabama.

We’ve discovered many species since Mohr first published that book,
but many of us still carefully sift through our fragile old copies, looking to
find Mohr’s astute observations about plant communities in Alabama –
sometimes, sadly, the last observations made before those communities
were obliterated. The book has never been “digitized” to my
knowledge, and even if it were, there’s something about holding an old
copy of Plant Life that is almost as rare and exciting as finding Mohr’s rosinweed in full bloom.

And that’s why Jackie Palmer’s recent gift of Plant Life of Alabama is so
special to us.


Books have a life and history. Not just the text. But the pages themselves,
the worn cover, the grease marks of having been thumbed through,
the first owner’s name scribbled proudly on the opening pages, the
marginalia of many minds making notes about what they’ve read.


So there’s something that can be read in the bindings of a book that
can’t be read on the internet. And the more owners and readers who
handle the book, the more likely it is that the book will take on new
meaning. It’s a ghost text that much-handled books have.


That’s one of the exciting and challenging things about being gifted
much of E.O. Wilson’s natural history library – thanks to Ed’s long-time
assistant Kathleen Horton. Many of those books were so rare when first
printed, they are precious resources for us even if they had never been
opened. But the real history of that collection lives in who used it, who
made notes, who drew the tiny perfect pictures of ants, who sent the
books and who received them.


Even as we begin to develop our own server to store electronically all
the data and all the studies we are producing, we can’t seem to free
ourselves from the science of old books. And fortunately for us, the folks
at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva, North Carolina, and Jackie Palmer in particular, added significantly to our collection.

The copy of Plant Life of Alabama that Jackie gave us was as clean
and undamaged as a 120-year-old book could be. But as with so many
of E.O. Wilson’s books, there was a ghost text hidden in the end papers:
“HAGleason Nov. 14, 1903.” Shortly after this book was first published,
one of the most famous botanists in North America, Henry Allan
Gleason, carefully inscribed his name just inside the cover. That’s some
of the best evidence we have that Alabama’s first botany influenced
the development of Gleason and Cronquist’s Manual of Vascular Plants
of Northeastern United States and Adjacent Canada, which became
the most influential North American botany of the mid-20th century.


Gleason’s legacy was broader than the Vascular Plants volume. He was
director of the New York Botanical Gardens, and in many ways the E.O.
Wilson of his day, attempting to rethink unfounded notions about how
ecosystems assemble and fall apart. His concepts are still controversial,
but they marked an important turning point, as people began to
recognize that ecosystems weren’t monolithic and unchanging, but
often frequently changing associations of species whose fates could be
independent of the systems they were found in. That’s an argument that
our founding scientists, UCLA’s Stephen Hubbell and Ed Wilson, could
spend many days debating.


Understanding that relationship between species and ecosystems is still
a perplexing problem, and one we’re deeply involved with at Paint
Rock. It’s as if Gleason’s inscription in Plant Life of Alabama is a hand
reaching out to us from the past, guiding our research on the future of forests.

City Lights bookstore and Jackie Palmer also presented us with another Alabama book
treasure. This copy of Birds of Alabama was owned by Frank Hahn, who lived on the
Mississippi and Alabama border, and whose included notes on bird sightings in the area
offer another ghost text that we’ll be studying.

The copy of Birds of Alabama belonged to a man near where Bill was born and raised in Mississippi, he know the area well.

When Jacksonville State meets Paint Rock, art and science converge

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Life, fortunately, is complicated.

Tim Lindblom’s life got a lot more complicated recently when he was
appointed interim dean of the new college of Arts, Humanities and
Sciences at Jacksonville State University. JSU had formerly siloed
Sciences and Math in one college, where Tim was already building a
reputation as Dean. Arts and Humanities was neatly isolated in another.
Now Tim, the cell biologist who sometimes teaches fly fishing, is
managing art, music and drama majors along with biologists, chemists
and mathematicians.


Tim has long taken an interest in our work here at Paint Rock Forest
Research Center. But his new-found complication is already proving to
be a boon to us. Tim brought faculty from art AND sciences to explore the potential at Paint Rock. And each of those faculty members
brought their own wonderful complications

Depending on whom you talk to, Jimmy Triplett is either one of the best
old-time fiddlers in the country, or the top researcher on the genetics of
North America bamboos. You can find his recordings of West Virginia
fiddle tunes on many internet sites (Kathy Horton and I have a special
fondness for Shakin Off the Acorns, and Jimmy’s version is the best since
Edden Hammond let loose with it a century ago). While you’re listening,
you can wonder, as I do, how Jimmy had to time to make Alabama the
center of bamboo diversity and bamboo studies in North America,
identifying two very distinct species new to science.

Bryce Lafferty, Department Head of Art and Design, is an artist whose
watercolors are geological, ecological and mystical all at once,
exploring the deep strata of rocks and stream and forests and turning
them into scenic anatomies of earth. If you see his work, you’ll
immediately recognize why he would be taken with Paint Rock, where
mountains plunge into caves, and the innards of earth have been sliced
open for all to see.

Tenzing Ingty is a conservation biologist and superb photographer
whose beautiful book about a biological hotspot in the Himalayas has
drawn wide praise. Tenzing’s range of scientific vision is immense. He’s
focused one week on the difference in flower evolution in tropical and
temperate plants, and the next on human social interactions with
natural systems and the growing impacts of climate change. He’s seen
surprising similarities in Alabama and the Himalayas, and I think he may
have even been impressed by the steep ride up to the top of the
preserve.

These are all scientific artists, and their broad, interdisciplinary
perspectives on nature are precisely the kind of complications we hope
to encourage here at Paint Rock. Tim understood that all along, and we
look forward to working with him, with these, and with others at JSU over
the next few years, fiddlers, photographers, watercolorists, geneticists,
evolutionary biologists and all.

What can you do in five years?

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What can you get done in 5 years?

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.

Cumberland shortleaf: the seeds of North America’s future

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Shortleaf cone harvest at the Jones Farm
Shortleaf 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.

Bill Finch

The The doulas of shortleaf

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The doulas of shortleaf

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.

Bill Finch

Jones Farm

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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?


— Bill Finch