Category: Conservation

By Bill Finch, Director For more than a week this October, we’ve been spending days at The Nature Conservancy’s Chitwood Barrens Nature Preserve in northeast Alabama because it preserves one of our most important but increasingly

By Kelsey Barnett-Fischels, Communications Director  Bill Finch, founding director of Paint Rock Research Center, was itching to light a fire. Early summer rains and high humidity had held us up for weeks already. Finch tossed a

By Kelsey Barnett-Fischels, Communications Director I don’t have a Paint Rock rattlesnake story. But after speaking with our center researchers and others for this week’s newsletter, I expect it won’t be long until I meet one

By Bill Finch, Founding Director Another year, another Act of God. At least that’s what our legal contracts call them, and they’re so big, you feel like something even bigger ought to take the blame. Last

The Paint Rock Forest Research Center has long been a leader in efforts to restore shortleaf pine, the cornerstone one the South’s most important ecosystems. If you are interested in containerized native shortleaf pine seedlings from

Seeds of a new initiative sown at national Shortleaf Pine conference The mountain-top plateaus surrounding the Paint Rock Valley were once covered in a forest unlike anything most folks have ever seen. It was a sun-drenched

Land set ablaze, flames racing to devour plants and leaving only a trail of blackened ash — it’s an image that may seem destructive, but in a prescribed burn, it’s one of nature’s most powerful tools

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

The Southern Cumberlands Plateau and Ridge and Valley systems shelter the greatest diversity of tree species and aquatic life in the Appalachians. Paint Rock Valley supports almost double the oak species found in Great Smoky Mountains

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

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,

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

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

What a way and a day to start the 2023 shortleaf pine seed harvest – onthe celebrated 2400-acre Jones Farm in Huntsville, with a haul of pinecones that almost equalled the total number of cones collected

Limestone is the milk of Alabama ecosystems. It builds good bones, in animals, in forests and grasslands, in streams and rivers. It attracts does and hunters to those big racks in the Black Belt. It forms the

Callaway Sink. A hole in the top of the Cumberland Plateau two miles wide and 700 or so feet deep. High forests slide slowly into its depths. No water leaves the site except through the gaping

As a 6-year-old living enthusiastically in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, fascinated by images of brontosaurs bigger than my house and tyrannosaurs that could terrorize my teachers, I would have been shocked and dismayed to discover what

Be careful what you pick up on the banks of the Paint Rock River. There’s a frighteningly real risk it may be the last of its kind. Carla Atkinson, the aquatic biologist and ecologist from University

A map showing vegetation zones of eastern North America at the end of the last glaciation. Look closely, and you’ll notice that sea level has dropped, allowing forests to extend about 80 miles south into the

It’s a bit raggedy, but spring is already with us in Paint Rock. Heart and mind open to a new year when the trout lilies bloom, and we’re delighted to see them whenever they emerge. But

We’re sitting on something like 400,000 shortleaf pine seeds right now—seed that will be used to restore the Southern Cumberland’s great lost forest system. It’s pretty safe to say that’s the largest collection of shortleaf seeds