Alabama Research Center Works to Understand ‘One of the Last Great Wild Places’ – Inside Climate News

Bill Finch was bumping along in a muddy four-wheel utility vehicle on a rocky road near the Paint Rock Forest Research Center when a research assistant in another four-wheeler rumbled up next to him. 

“Are you going to check the Hawthorn? Has it leafed out yet?” Nathan Paris called out to him that spring morning. 

Finch, whose gray beret, wire-rim glasses and full white beard lend him a professorial air, turned off his engine and shook his head. “Be patient,” he said. 

Longtime conservationist Finch has spent a lifetime practicing patience in his study of forest dynamics, genetic diversity and how this lush landscape of northeast Alabama will be affected by changing environmental conditions. His quest is to understand the trees and their prospects. What he shares from his wanderings in one of the richest biodiverse regions in North America will likely inform conservation methods for generations and influence future strategies to adapt to a changing climate.

Finch is the co-founder of a research center in Paint Rock Valley, 4,000 wild acres edged by mountains and laced with clear springs and streams. The center is perched within The Nature Conservancy’s Sharp Bingham Preserve, not far from Huntsville. 

The Hawthorn tree that prompted the early morning exchange is a once-thought extinct species—not seen since 1914 and a most satisfying surprise for Finch a couple years ago. He had noticed on daily treks in the forest an unusual patch of some Hawthorn under a canopy of mature tall trees. Finch identified two species, was uncertain about the third type of the thorny branched deciduous and was stumped by the other foliage. 

Finch reached out to Brian Keener, a professor of biological sciences and founder of the digital compendium Alabama Plant Atlas at the University of West Alabama, who raised the possibility that the mysterious tree was the extinct Hawthorn. 

Finch and Keener called Ron Lance, a Hawthorn expert from South Carolina and author of a definitive book on the Crataegus genus, a family of trees related to apples and pears. They compared the unknown species to the official botanical reference dating from 1914, which includes dried leaf, fruit and flower collections known as a herbarium specimen. Their epiphany? They rediscovered a species native to a few counties in the Cumberland region of Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia with its distinctive large and hairy leaves and stems. 

Finch collected seeds for DNA analysis and seed propagation, part of Finch’s ongoing endeavor to document species survival and adaptation. The nonprofit HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville and the University of Georgia also contributed significant help.

“Biodiversity is a tool” to deal with a rapidly changing world, Finch said. “We don’t know what the future is going to look like in 2075, and biodiversity represents our choices for the future. And if we don’t have that biodiversity, we’ve lost our choices to adapt to all the changes we know about and all the changes we still can’t predict.”

Finch’s career spans five decades of great change. He studied forestry as a student at Warren Wilson College, located in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. His first job out of college was writing about herb gardens for Mother Earth News, a bimonthly launched in 1970 and rooted in respect for ecology and back-to-the-land sensibilities. His wife, Beth Maynor Finch, a renowned photographer, has chronicled the wild places of the South for several decades.They initially met collaborating on a book about the longleaf pine forest and later reconnected through their mutual interest in conservation.

Finch joined the Mobile Press Register as an editor and environmental writer from 1993 to 2005 and crossed paths with E.O. Wilson, American biologist and naturalist who became a friend and colleague. By 2006, Finch was named director of conservation at The Nature Conservancy. 

In 2007, he joined with Wilson, a native of Alabama who had retired from Harvard University in 1996 after 40 years of teaching but remained as professor emeritus, and Stephen Hubbell and Patricia Adair Gowaty, distinguished biologists and professors emeritus from University of California who are married, to consider how to create a research plot in a diverse, temperate and mature forest. 

While the group dreamed and planned, Wilson and Hubbell engaged in heated philosophical debates rooted in intellectual curiosity and determining what the limits could or should be. “Ed would say, ‘I want to know everything,’ and Steve would say, ‘That’s just unknowable,’” Finch recalled.

Wilson, who asserted “80 percent of the species out there, we don’t know,” wanted to understand each individual species. Hubbell wanted to investigate the broader impacts on ecosystems, Finch added. 

It took a decade of searching for land and raising funds, but in 2017, their vision, encompassing both approaches, came to fruition at Paint Rock Forest Research Center. 

They were fortuitous to land in this Alabama valley at the southern end of the Appalachian Mountains on the Cumberland Plateau because “this is one of the last great wild places in the eastern U.S.,” Finch said.

The Paint Rock Forest Research Center includes a house and a barn, built by a former private owner, now used for seed processing. The property sits atop a natural cave system with an underground water supply from cave pools and waterfalls and covers a diverse terrain, including sandstone plateaus, wetlands and thickets of bamboo.

The research plot is a dynamic, thriving expanse with 150 acres mapped into 1,600 survey plots, each 20 by 20 meters (65 by 65 feet). So far, 86,000 trees, including seedlings as thin as a pencil and seasoned timbers three feet in diameter and pushing up to 130 feet in the sky, have been measured, tagged and identified. 

Annually, there are dozens of researchers and fellows—including students and faculty from University of Alabama, Jacksonville State University, University of Georgia, University of West Alabama and national institutes—who visit to collect genetic material to document new species and understand how species interact, survive, evolve and adapt to a changing environment. 

The forest will serve this generation and the next as a potential genetic reservoir for climate-resistant tree species, Finch said. And it will help answer a critical and monumental question. 

“What is the future of species, and what is our future with those species?” Finch said. 

“Both survivals are interlinked.” 

“Keys to the Future”

Standing in the forest that has existed as long as 100 years and surrounded by towering trees about to leaf out, Finch picks up a large, brown leaf with black spots. While some foresters in the past have suggested the unusual leaves are a hybrid oak leaf, Finch believes they are evidence of a new species and his team is investigating. Other potential new species on the preserve include violets, maples, elms, and Robinia (a legume-like tree).

“As climate changes, we have the keys to the future,” Finch said about his effort to understand how species and ecosystems interact and survive in order to protect Alabama’s irreplaceable natural heritage and safeguard it as a critical national resource for ecological understanding and adaptation

Alabama served as a “refugia” during the ice ages. Here many species survived and diversified, making it a global hotspot of biodiversity. Its varied geology, including limestone habitats, and its high rainfall levels—up to 70 inches per year—have also contributed to its biodiversity. 

Today, Alabama has 40 native oak species compared to only 12 along the entire Appalachian trail. Alabama is the national center of magnolia and buckeye diversity and accounts for 80 percent of all hickory trees in the world, Finch said.

Alabama is also the center of freshwater aquatic diversity in the United States—its waters have the nation’s greatest number of mollusks and fish—and has more species of mussels than all of South America, making it a global center of such diversity, according to Finch.

Its inherent riches provide a natural cleansing of air and water, moderate the temperature, help to limit flooding, cycle nutrients to crops and spur pollinations for flower and agriculture, said Noah Greenwald, endangered species co-director of The National Center for Biodiversity. Most modern-day medications also come from species that thrive in the forest, he said. 

Species are the building blocks of ecosystems that support our way of life, he said. But beyond the practical considerations, “we’re making our world a less interesting and more lonely place as we lose more and more species,” Greenwald said. “We lose some of the beauty and the magic of the world every day.”

The center, with four full-time and three part-time employees and an annual operating budget over $300,000, isn’t involved in forest genetics research alone. The center has about equal funds for fellowship and scholarships. Researchers are exploring cave ecosystems, monitoring aquatic species, restoring shortleaf pine and bamboo ecosystems, studying wildflowers and conducting bird and insect surveys in partnership with a variety of state, national and international research institutions.

Alabama contains populations and genetic resources that can be used to repopulate and restore degraded ecosystems in other parts of the country, acting as a “storehouse” and “warehouse” of species diversity, Finch said. 

“Diversity helps us weather change, and the more diversity you have, the more choices you have to deal with those changes.”

But ecosystem restoration isn’t simple. “You can’t just move a tree here, you have to understand why trees have survived here and what’s happening in the soil,” Finch said. Understanding soil and respecting the pathogens within helps drive diversity, he said. 

Finch drops the unidentified oak leaf, which flutters to the ground. Then he points to the small silver tag, attached by his research team, that hangs like a necklace and identifies one of the almost 100,000 trees that his center monitors. 

“We’re here for a special reason. Understanding heat-tolerant species and heat-tolerant genetics within species. What happens for New England forests—as things change—is they will have to borrow from Alabama. 

“Our diversity will be their diversity.”

When Forests Are Reduced

While a 4,000-acre preserve might seem expansive, it’s quite small in terms of preserving a complete ecosystem. When forests are cut off and reduced in size, they fit what E.O. Wilson described as “island biogeography,” where small isolated areas become less diverse with more species loss.

“If we’re going to have any chance of a future on this Earth, we’re going to have to do more than have places where we walk our dogs,” Finch said. According to estimates by Greenwald’s National Center for Biodiversity, one third of all species—a million species in all—are at risk if climate change proceeds unchecked. Studying individual species and forest preservation in isolated patches without considering the broader context would be “like studying the sea worthiness of the Titanic while it was sinking,” Finch added.

At the Paint Rock Forest Research Center, researchers have sought to expand their methods and horizons. 

In the past, researchers collected fresh young green leaves from the tree canopy by taking strategic shots at the top of the trees. Using a 12-gauge shotgun, researchers would pepper #4 lead shot at specific branches. The tumbling leaves were immediately preserved in liquid nitrogen for genetic tests and molecular study back at the center’s labs. 

This spring, in collaboration with HudsonAlpha, the center’s researchers cast unwieldy 35-foot lineman’s poles into the upper branches of the trees to “fish” fresh leaves from the top of the canopy. Leaves from more than a hundred trees will be examined this way in an attempt to better understand how trees age, thrive and survive. 

Researchers luckily beat nature by a matter of days during their leaf mission. They collected leaf samples just before 185 mile-an-hour high winds splintered 200 acres of the mature forest, cutting off access to that area for further research for now. They may, in the future, consider whether drones could be used to help document the ancient forest. 

Researchers from the University of Alabama are currently pursuing another project to reconstruct 300 years of forest history, counting tree rings and conducting core sampling of trees to understand the forest’s historical composition and changes. 

“One Last Wild Place”

During the 20th century, the building of dams contributed to the largest mass extinction event in North America. The Tennessee Valley Authority completed the Wilson Dam in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in 1924, and Alabama Power built seven hydroelectric dams over the course of the century. 

The dams destroyed habitats and disrupted migration, resulting in the extinction or eradication of 40 species of freshwater snails and mussels, according to the Alabama Rivers Alliance. Human activity played prominently in sculpting the current environment. 

Finch stood in an area of the forest that he refers to as a “sink,” where the ground dips from a cave system that collapsed centuries ago. The entire Paint Rock Valley is essentially a collapsed cave system, where rainfall has been absorbed by the karst or limestone in the ground, which may have played an important role in preserving tree species. Humans have always interacted with the land, but they didn’t always have the tools to wipe out everything and make it a golf course, Finch said a bit wryly. 

Homesteaders lived in this section of the forest, he said. The trees tell the story, revealing different growth patterns in open areas, specifically a big white oak nearby that he points out.

Finch sees what he calls a “wolf-like” pattern in the tree’s profile—it stands as a lone wolf, larger and older with spreading branches indicative of growing in an open, sunlit area. The time the homesteaders left 120 years ago can be measured by the age of the pines growing in what was a field or pasture, Finch said. 

In May, Finch had a chance to observe the ravages of nature and consider, once again, his own reverence for its immense power. On May 20, a tornado tore through the forest’s deep ravines, reshaping the landscape.

The day Finch stood and surveyed the damage he couldn’t look away from the “ugly, broken, sun-burned tangle of trunks” of trees that had shaded the forest floor for centuries. “Awesome” was the word he kept repeating. 

Later, Finch offered this insight: “If life gives you a tornado, you make tornado research.” 

So he made plans. His teams would repair roads, figure out how to remove downed trees if dangerous, and observe the long-term recovery processes hidden in the forest. The research, he said, could provide insights into forest resilience, species adaptation, and the role of natural disturbances in ecosystem dynamics.

The ruin was a fresh opportunity for Finch. Preserving Alabama’s diversity will help natural systems globally, he said. Biodiversity loss here can lead to cascading ecological, genetic, and economic consequences that reverberate far beyond Alabama’s borders. 

This one last great wild place in Alabama can be protected, as Finch said, “not just as an asset to Alabama, but an asset to the whole country.”