A Southern Forest Story

Soil Opens Window to the Past and the Future p.3

• The more Richter and Markewitz studied the Calhoun, the more they were interested in how the long history of cotton had altered the soil. In addition to assembling the chain of deeds for the Calhoun fields back to royal grants in the 1750s, they sought out for comparison four uncultivated soils that remained intact under old stands of oak and hickory. These are hardly "virgin forests," says Richter, "as they were undoubtedly used for timber, grazing, and fuelwood. On the other hand, the soils in these hardwood stands are relatively intact compared with the majority of the Piedmont landscape, which has been cultivated and cropped by many generations of farmers."

Not only have these hardwood forests provided insights into the carbon cycle, the uncultivated soils have proven to be remarkably acidic and infertile. Richter suggests that the natural acidity possessed by many soils of the Southeast has been underestimated, as has the degree to which historical Southern agriculture enriched soils with fertilizer nutrients and lime. "Not a small fraction of the nutrients cycled by the modern southeastern forest originated from fertilizers added by long-forgotten sharecroppers and tenant farmers," says Richter.

In an effort to increase the number of research sites available for long-term studies of soil, Richter is developing an initiative with the Southern Center for Sustainable Forests to network long-term research sites across the southern forest.This will allow researchers to better document changes in long-term productivity and in soil fertility.

Richter is one of three co-directors of the Southern Center, a research center formed in 1997 by Duke, North Carolina State University, and the North Carolina Division of Forest Resources to conduct research on controversial issues related to forests.

Richter says he is awed by increases in human demands on soils across the South, but also throughout the world. "Nowhere is it easy to use soil without damaging it, and we are clearly challenged by how to make the most of the soils we have inherited." Richter says he would like to do his part in helping to improve management of the earth’s soil, a task that depends on understanding how we are changing what he calls the "central processing unit of the earth’s environment."

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