Collaborating with agencies and communities

By Mark Kolinski, Alabama Program Manager

Sure, these are challenging times, but what times are not? Twenty years ago our National Forest system was still managed primarily as a timber resource for the lumber and paper industries. “Get out the cut!” was the order of the day. 12 billion board feet of timber were logged each year on our national forests, and vast acreages of native hardwoods in the southeastern U.S., havens of biological diversity, were brought down and converted to monoculture pine plantations, tree farms that served only one purpose.

Does this mean we have less work to do? Hardly.

Wherever the profit motive threatens ecosystem health there will still be a need for advocacy. Energy development, such as oil and gas leases, habitat fragmentation caused by urban and rural development and even the evolving national policies regarding climate change and alternative fuels all threaten our last wild places. We will remain vigilant.

Nevertheless, it is satisfying to us to begin to see places where sound ecological restoration principles drive forest management, and it is here that the nature of our work continues to evolve and our mission, to inspire and empower people, finds its truest expression.

A good example of this is in the national forests of Alabama, particularly the Bankhead, where one of the most progressive land and resource management plans, focused on restoration, was enacted in 2004. Our past adversarial relationship with the Forest Service here has become one of collaboration, and we are rolling up our sleeves and getting the local community involved in on-the-ground projects to benefit forest health and help the Forest Service to meet its management goals.

Thanks to past and present financial support by our members and organizations like the National Forest Foundation (NFF), Patagonia, REI, Fund for Wild Nature and the Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation, Wild South in Alabama currently has four projects ongoing in the Bankhead, all of which fill needs where Forest Service resources fall short.

Each one of these projects depends on the involvement of capable, energetic and generous volunteers who come mostly from communities in the northern half of Alabama.

Canyon Surveying

Our Canyon Survey program has been in place since 2004, when the Revised Land and Resource Management Plan (LRMP) for National Forests in Alabama went into effect. The LRMP recognized the Bankhead’s canyons as rare and unique communities deserving of protection under a new management prescription. However, the LRMP only allocated about 100 miles of canyon corridors to this new prescription, specifying that additional “canyon corridors will be added to the 4.L prescription and mapped as found.”

Wild South offered to undertake the labor-intensive walking survey necessary to document and map all the canyons, in order to ensure protection for these sensitive areas, and the Forest Service accepted. The survey was implemented by volunteers and interns until 2006, when a grant from the NFF through their Matching Awards Program (MAP) enabled Wild South to hire a part-time staffer to pursue the survey year-round. NFF has continued their support of this program every year since then, and the survey is now about half completed.

This summer two interns, one funded by the Stanback Internship Program and one by Warren-Wilson College’s Environmental Leadership Center’s Sustainability Internship Program, will be assisting in the canyon mapping, and we expect to make significant progress with their help. To date the program has completed the survey on almost 70,000 acres and mapped close to 4,000 acres of canyons.

Restoration Monitoring

Wild South played a key role in the development of the 2004 LRMP through our participation on the Bankhead Liaison Panel. Beginning in 2004 we headed up the Panel’s Timber and Thinning Working Group, which has evolved into what is now our Restoration Monitoring Program, supported since 2006 by the NFF MAP grant.

The main focus of the LRMP in the Bankhead is to restore the more than 70,000 acres of loblolly pine plantations established by the Forest Service last century to native forest types, including several types of fire-adapted woodland communities that were historically present but have vanished from Alabama’s landscape due to fire suppression. These forests are important in providing habitat for many wildlife and migratory bird species, some of which are threatened or endangered.

The Bankhead District is pursuing its restoration goals through prescribed burning and various methods of thinning. Long-term monitoring of representative restoration sites promotes the adaptive management necessary to mitigate the negative effects of these cultural practices on soils, water, vegetation and wildlife, while confirming that the forest is progressing toward its desired future condition.

Three or four times a year we organize and conduct multi-party monitoring tours with the USFS, academic and scientific professionals, and the public to view restoration activities and discuss goals, operations and outcomes. We are currently monitoring 25 sites, and the reports and photographs will soon be available on our website. New sites will continue to be added as the Forest Service conducts environmental assessments and develops management alternatives for all the 6th-level watersheds in the Bankhead. May 5 is our next scheduled monitoring tour.

Helping Hands

The NFF MAP grant has also been supporting our Helping Hands Program since its inception in 2007. Through this program we recruit volunteers from surrounding communities to accomplish projects in the Bankhead, such as trash pickup, tree planting, sandstone glade restoration, and trail restoration and maintenance. This year we have contracted with the Forest Service to maintain Sipsey Wilderness trails 203 and 206 as part of our Helping Hands work.

Our newest project in the Bankhead begins May 1 and is made possible by another NFF matching grant through its Wilderness Stewardship Challenge program. For the next year Wild South staff and volunteers will be inventorying and mapping non-native invasive plant populations along all the marked trails and year-round streams in the 25,000 acre Sipsey Wilderness. More about this exciting project in future issues of WSQ.

Nature Hikes

Yet another way Wild South in Alabama gets people out into the forest is through our outreach and education program. Staff members and volunteers lead several hikes in the Bankhead each month for adults and children. Our objective is to teach people where they can go to enjoy their public lands and feel comfortable taking their children there. When we take children to our creeks, canyons and forests, every hike becomes an ecological classroom, educating about our place in the web of life and planting the seeds of future conservation.

Elsewhere

Alabama is not the only place Wild South is engaged in hands-on work on the ground. Cultural Heritage Director Lamar Marshall has spent many hours in research and field work mapping the Cherokee trail system in western North Carolina, which will be incorporated into the Cherokee history criteria in schools and educational programs. Our ongoing work with Hellbender and Cerulean warbler populations, reported in past issues of WSQ, exemplifies our commitment to wildlife conservation. And at the end of March Conservation Director Ben Prater teamed up with Wild South partner, The Clinch Coalition, to organize a Hemlock Workshop in southwest Virginia, where we trained nearly fifty people from across the state in how to confront the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid, including a hands-on workshop on how to actually treat the trees.

As a grassroots organization, Wild South lives and grows through the support of its members. Join us in the field by volunteering, or consider helping us to raise the matching funds for our NFF grants. You will be helping to preserve healthy intact ecosystems and wild places for generations unborn.