Category: News

By Bill Finch, Founding Director Standing on the prow of the deck at our main house could indeed make you feel like you were flying. Fortunately, we fixed our Titanic before it sank. The buildings we

By Bill Finch, Founding Director There’s an arbitrary and misleading line standing between the Paint Rock Research Center and Sewanee, the University of the South. Sewanee is not much more than 50 minutes up the road

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

2 of the nation’s most prestigious firms are working with us on a long-term plan for Paint Rock How many businesses have a plan for the next 50 years? The sophisticated search engine I turned to

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

Thursday August 25, 2025 Bill Finch will be delivering a talk at 4:00 and the Exhibit opens from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. We would love to see you! Universities being hard to navigate and find parking,

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

March 2025 The Nature Conservancy Magazine published an article about the Future Forest, the work of the Paint Rock Forest Research Center is a large feature of this article. You can read it here.

We started eight years ago with the ambition of creating the largest and most diverse forest census in North America—an outdoor laboratory for forest studies unequalled on the continent. This week, the census is done. All

Photos by Gabe Sullivan-Brugger Text by Sakora Smeby As the year kicks off with many doors of opportunity opening, the tree census that has been worked on diligently by our many census crews wraps up. Each group

On November 10th, we were fortunate enough to celebrate our seventh year as a research center! The anniversary was commemorated through our annual harvest celebration. We gathered family, friends, and neighbors together to enjoy a beautiful

The smallest creatures at Paint Rock are getting top billing in international naturedocumentaries. Paint Rock’s exceptional display of fireflies — lighting bugs, as we like to call themdown here — are the latest creatures to headline

Paint Rock features prominently in Alabama Public Television’s newest video on the diversity of Alabama. Thanks to Brian Keener for putting all this together. /

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,

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,

Even when we don’t want to, we leave a pretty big footprint on Paint Rock. Or to be more precise, tire print. Yes, we chose the Sharp Bingham Preserve many years ago for our research program

Bill and Philip Howard were interviewed for a radio show about equal justice. The connections to Alabama’s biological diversity make perfect sense to understand our civil rights history.

Bill did a presentation to the Land Trust of North Alabama about the diversity in Alabama and how we fit into the extinction crisis. You can watch the talk here.

When E.O. Wilson died December 26th, many here may not have recognized how he changed Alabama in the eyes of the world. Those impressed by celebrity will be interested to know that Ed Wilson was likely

At Paint Rock, we’re launching E.O. Wilson’s moonshot On Half Earth Day last week, E.O. Wilson gave the world its marching orders, the same marching orders he gave the Paint Rock Forest Research Center when he