Unearthing insights for a Sustainable Future in a
Rural South Carolina Forest
Dan Richter’s Team Investigates Environmental Effects of Wood Energy p.5
by Tim Lucas
Mobley focuses on carbon cycling and sequestration. By measuring the biomass and carbon content of felled wood in various stages of its decay—from newly downed trees whose bark and needles are still fresh, to logs and stumps in their final stages of decomposition—she can determine how much carbon is sequestered above and below ground in the forest, and at what rate it is released back into the atmosphere.
Jackson is investigating the impacts of intensive management and land-use history on soil biology, particularly on fungi and mushrooms that grow on the forest floor and play a vital role in the regenerative process.
“What we’re finding is that the process of re-growing trees influences the soil a lot more than previously thought,” says Richter. “Soil is much more dynamic and alive than it appears in textbooks.”
Calhoun Experimental Forest is located in a 5,000-acre swath of Sumter National Forest, about 40 minutes south of Spartanburg, S.C. The nearest town, Union, is 15 miles away along a two-lane stretch of asphalt that winds past one-room churches, shooting ranges, a deermeat processing plant, a former Army bombing range, and the campsite used by Richter and colleagues when working at the Calhoun.
The site originally was covered by a vast hardwood forest that was cleared for cotton in the early 1800s. Decades of intensive farming took its toll. By 1930, erosion had stripped away much of the sandy topsoil, turning many of the once fertile fields into red-clay badlands. The U.S. Forest Service deemed the site to have some of the poorest soil in the Southeast. It bought the land for $3.50 an acre—only slightly more than what plantation owners paid in 1876—and set it aside for long-term experiments on human impacts on forest soils and ecosystems. Louis Metz, a Forest Service scientist who received his PhD from the Duke School of Forestry, planted pine seedlings in the old fields in 1956-57. Forest Service researcher Carol Wells continued the study until he retired in the 1980s, when the mantle was passed to Richter.
Today, 50-year-old loblolly pines, some planted in soldier-straight rows, others growing wherever their seeds took root, dominate the landscape. Deer, wild turkeys and other game—along with teeming populations of fire ants, termites, chiggers and ticks—inhabit the scattered understory of oaks, red maples and sweet gums. Gullies and deeply incised streambeds still scar the land, but widespread erosion has been checked, and in some places repaired, by forest regrowth.
Richter can’t imagine a more perfect place for his team to conduct their research.
“The studies we’re able to do here, and the long-term data we have access to, provide unique observations about environmental history, soil change, forest restoration and interactions with the wider environment,” he says. “You could tour a site like this, with its history of abuse, and only see problems. But it holds promise, too. If we can grow trees on this land, there is hope that we can restore and manage ecosystems across a very wide landscape indeed—maybe even for wood energy.”
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.