Unearthing insights for a Sustainable Future in a
Rural South Carolina Forest
Dan Richter’s Team Investigates Environmental Effects of Wood Energy
by Tim Lucas
With its post-apocalyptic landscape of rotting stumps, sawed-off tree tops and piles of wood debris teeming with termites, Dan Richter’s research site at the Calhoun Experimental Forest in upstate South Carolina is proof that beauty is in the eye, and inquiring mind, of the beholder.
Richter is professor of soils and forest ecology at the Nicholas School. For nearly two decades, he and his students have come to this 10-acre parcel of dry upland pine forest, growing in a region of heavily eroded former cotton fields, to study the effects of 200 years of changing land use on forest soils and ecosystems.
The beauty of the scarred landscape— half of which was clear cut for experimental purposes in 2007—lies in the rich repository of scientific data and environmental history that investigators from Duke and collaborating institutions are unearthing at the site.
“The Calhoun Experimental Forest has become an ecologically significant experiment, because of what it tells us about how the environment responds to land use,” Richter says. “This is one of only a handful of sites where we have land-use records dating back two centuries and have been able to directly observe changes in the forest ecosystem and soil over time scales of decades.
“What we learn here about the long-term effects of intensive soil management,” he says, “can be applied to the development of sustainable land-use practices worldwide.”
The forest, which has been managed as a research site for 51 years, has long been a fertile field laboratory for studies on forest productivity, soil acidification, carbon sequestration, nitrogen depletion and mineral weathering.
Recently, Richter also has become interested in using it to investigate the environmental effects of wood energy.
Burning wood for fuel is as old as civilization itself, he notes. Until coal and oil became widely available (only about 100 years ago in America), wood was humanity’s primary source of energy, at times leading to overexploitation of forest resources and, in extreme cases, deforestation. It is still the primary source for more than two billion people, chiefly in developing countries.
During the last decade, rising oil prices and escalating concerns about climate change, global carbon cycles and overdependence on foreign fuels have rekindled interest in wood energy in many developed nations, too.
photo captions: Richter at the Calhoun Forest; panorama of the Calhoun Forest; Richter, Jason Jackson, Meg Mobley and Jian Wei Li surveying the Calhoun site.