Fernow Experimental Forest Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Middle School Students Join WVU Researchers To Study Acid Rain In Tucker County

Since 1989, West Virginia University (WVU) scientists have been studying the environmental effects of acid rain in the Fernow Experimental Forest in Tucker County. COVID-19 pandemic restrictions forced the long-term experiment to change in recent years, and researchers are now inviting local students to take part in the project’s next phase. Chris Schulz sat down with WVU biology professor Edward Brzostek to discuss the changes.

Chris Schulz sat down with WVU biology professor Edward Brzostek to discuss the changes.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Schulz: If you could start us off by telling me in your own words about this project.

Brzostek: We’d been working at a long-term research site in Tucker County, West Virginia called the Fernow Experimental Forest starting in 1989. They did an experiment where they were artificially acidifying a whole forest watershed to mimic what was coming out of coal fired power plants and leading to acid rain across the region.

We learned a lot of different things about how the forest responded to that acidification. One of the things we learned is that the nitrogen actually led to the trees growing faster.

There were some bad things though. These forests also leaked more nitrogen because they were getting more nitrogen inputs, and they just couldn’t hold on to it.

So a lot of it leached into waterways, which can impact water quality. In 2020, we couldn’t get the helicopter or the airplane to fly. Then there was also a lapse in funding. And so the experiment, we stopped adding nitrogen and sulfur to the watershed, and we thought this actually is a great opportunity. And one of the things that this mimics is actually the success of the Clean Air Act.

Edward Brzostek, associate professor, biology, WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences. *Courtesy WVU*

So the Clean Air Act reduced nitrogen and sulfur emissions. And they’re almost negligible to these forest ecosystems now. And so what we’re really interested in is, okay, if we stop having this pollution coming into the forest to the good effects, which is the enhanced carbon storage in the trees in the soils, are they maintained? Or do we lose them? And then are the bad effects to those also, do we keep having those bad effects? They go away quickly.

Schulz: So do you have any hypotheses that you’re working on at the moment?

Brzostek: We have a hypothesis for how the forests responded, when it really relies on is that forests are somewhat like people and trees are somewhat like people, they’re gonna spend their cash, or in this case, carbon, on what they need the most. And so when you have nitrogen going into a forest, the trees aren’t going to spend as much carbon in the soil. So they’re going to make less roots, they’re going to send less carbon to their root friends, to symbiotic fungi. They’re also bacteria that live right around the roots. And so basically, they’re investing less carbon to get nitrogen. And so by doing that, what that means is the tree can grow more above ground. And because you don’t have that carbon going into the soil, it’s not fueling the microbes as much.

And so what our main hypothesis is moving forward, as the nitrogen stuffs being dumped on the forest, what we’re going to have is the trees, they’re going to be sending more carbon below ground, to their roots and their microbial friends, that’s going to restart decomposition, and it’s gonna lead to potential soil carbon losses, while at the same time, as we might see reductions in tree growth above ground, because the trees are now limited by the amount of nitrogen that’s in the soil.

Schulz: You mentioned that this long-term study has helped you understand the impacts of the Clean Air Act. Why was it necessary to set this up as a more controlled study, when you could just go out and do field research in any of the other forests of the state?

Brzostek: We can go out and we can do observational studies, and folks have done these across the entire eastern seaboard. But one thing, when you’re looking at those observational data, it’s hard to think about other factors that could lead to differences in growth, or in soil, carbon or other things that could impact your data. So by having a controlled experiment, you can isolate other confounding factors like climate, or tree species or where you are, or the soils are the bedrock. And you can actually delve into what the actual mechanisms are. So that’s why having the controled experiment really lets you kind of get rid of all the noise and be able to look at, okay, what is actually driving this? Is it the microbes? Is it this symbiotic fungi? Is it the trees?

Schulz: One of the things that jumped out to me was the inclusion of K-12 students and specifically middle school students. In this project, can you tell me a little bit about why you chose to target that specific group?

Brzostek: The Fernow is located in Tucker County, and many of those students, they live right in the backdrop of that, the Fernow Experimental Forest, and they don’t have any real knowledge of the science that goes on there, about the important findings that we have found at that site. And so one of the things we did in this project is designed a number of activities to bring the students out into the field, have them collect real data, have them analyze that data and actually learn about all this science that’s going right on in their backyard that they just aren’t aware of.

WVU graduate student Zoe Pagliaro guides Vivienne Brzostek, a K-12 student, as she samples soils for analysis in the Fernow Experimental Forest in Tucker County.

*Credit: Hannah DeHetre/WVU*

Schulz: So can you tell me a little bit more about and what you’ve designed for these students?

Brzostek: You know, we’re gonna start off going into the classroom, doing a couple of different classroom activities where we give them some of the data on tree growth. We can walk them through graphing and just looking at that data and see, okay, yes, nitrogen lead to these trees growing faster. Moving forward, what we’d like to do is we’re going to bring the students out into the Fernow and lead them on a field trip where they’re going to collect actual data.

But the other thing that we can do are some simple litter decomposition experiments. So it’s both collecting observational data and then having the students do some simple experiments in the field where all you need to do is put a leaf in some window screening and then have its initial way at the beginning and then weigh it out, you know, weigh it six months later to see how fast microbial decomposition occurred.

Tucker Co. Eighth Graders Take Part In Years-Long WVU Experiment

Since 1989, West Virginia University scientists have been studying the environmental effects of acid rain in the Fernow Experimental Forest in Tucker County. Eighth-grade students will soon get to help.

An experiment 30 years in the making will involve eighth graders from Tucker County in its next phase.

Since 1989, West Virginia University scientists have been studying the environmental effects of acid rain in the Fernow Experimental Forest in Tucker County.

Edward Brzostek, associate professor of biology, said until 2020 scientists were artificially acidifying the forest’s watersheds.

“They were dumping nitrogen and sulfur onto this whole forest and watershed to mimic what was coming out of coal fired power plants and leading to acid rain across the region,” he said.

That phase of the experiment ended in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic caused a lapse in funding and restrictions prevented the continued artificial acidification. Now, Brzostek and his team will track different ecosystems within the forest as they recover.

He says the forest has already proven itself to be a strong training ground for graduate students and can do the same for middle schoolers living in the area.

“One of the things we did in this project is design a number of activities to bring the students out into the field, have them collect real data, have them analyze that data and actually learn about all this science that’s going on right in their backyard that they just aren’t aware of,” Brzostek said.

A recent five-year award from the National Science Foundation’s Long Term Research in Environmental Biology program will support continued study on the topic by WVU, the U.S. Forest Service and local students.

Meet the Little Green Clover That Beat the Odds

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is moving to take a rare species of plant found in the Ohio Valley off of the endangered species list. Amid controversial proposals to change the law protecting rare species, the Running Buffalo Clover is an example of a successful recovery. It would join about 2.5 percent of threatened and endangered species (42 species) that have been taken off the list, or delisted, due to recovery. There are still 1,663 U.S. plants and animals on the endangered species list.

Rediscovering Running Buffalo Clover

It’s a plant we all know and love, or we think we do: The clover. But one species of clover was thought to be extinct until someone found it in West Virginia 30 years ago. Biologist Rodney Bartgis recalls his discovery was met with some skepticism by a colleague.

“We were walking along the trail and I said, ‘Hey there’s Running Buffalo Clover!’ And he said, ‘No, it’s extinct.’ And I said, ‘That’s IT!’ And he bet me a steak dinner that it wasn’t,” Bartgis said. “I got that steak dinner.”

Running Buffalo Clover (not to be confused with Buffalo Clover) puts runners out, likes some sun, some shade and some disturbance.

Bartgis was working for the Nature Conservancy at the time, fresh out of graduate school. He was working on an inventory of rare plants for the organization and spotted the clover while surveying the New River Gorge. After he reported the find, Running Buffalo Clover was moved onto the endangered species list.

On a recent summer day he was hiking through the Fernow Experimental Forest in West Virginia with Melissa Thomas-Van Gundy, a research forester with the U.S. Forest Service. The Fernow is a public forest used to study logging and forest management techniques, and Thomas-Van Gundy explains, it’s one place where the clover lives.

“Part of the ‘running’ part comes from these stolins,” Thomas-Van Gundy said pointing to the roots of the plant. “Plant parts that are like a strawberry runner –

that’s how they colonize new places, they asexually reproduce.”

For years Thomas-Van Gundy has been helping to manage populations of Running Buffalo Clover here.

“Of course it’s not blooming right now,” she said, “but that is a really good way of identifying it.”

These clover are not like the ones you find in your yard. They’re much more sensitive. They can’t tolerate full sun, full shade, or severe disturbance. That said, Thomas-Van Gundy explains, they love heavy machinery.

Melissa Thomas-Van Gundy, a research forester with the Forest Service, stands with biologist Rodney Bartgis, who rediscovered the Running Buffalo Clover 30 years ago.

A Disturbing, Tenuous Recovery

Thomas Van-Gundy explains that in this particular tract of land, forest managers use heavy machinery every 10 years or so on paths they call skid roads. She recalls first finding the rare clover species and making adjustments to avoid disturbing it with timbering operations.

“We said, ‘Okay, Fish and Wildlife says you can’t disturb those plants, put your skid road up there – don’t use this skid road. We did that. Came back in. Plant numbers had dropped where we hadn’t run over them. They showed up on the new skid road!” she said. “So it’s kind of a frustrating plant if you think you have to stay off of it.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the clover as endangered in 1987. Since then, more populations have been found and monitored. Today about 150 populations are known to exist throughout Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Many of these populations are on public lands or they’re on private land with conservation agreements.

Thomas-Van Gundy and Bartgis say protecting these rare plants is an important part of maintaining the protective benefits of biodiversity. They say a more diverse forest is more resilient to disease, and they say people ultimately depend on healthy ecosystems for clean air and water. But Bartgis said his motivation to protect the Running Buffalo Clover is also rooted in the value of the stories it tells.

“Just imagine standing right here and a herd of mastodon coming right through,” Bartgis said. “That’s the disturbance-making that most of these species evolved in. Once the mastodon died out, they relied on the buffalo and elk – so we can go back to that story. And now they rely on us.”

When asked if he thought delisting the clover was a good idea, Bartgis said he felt alright about it. But the Running Buffalo Clover isn’t out of the woods, so to speak. Bartgis pointed to stilt grass and other invasive plants that could displace more delicate native species. So it’s important, he added, to continue to keep an eye, and maybe an occasional reintroduced elk hoof on them.

West Virginia Forests Aid Scientists in Understanding Role Nitrogen Plays in Carbon Storage

A new study featuring research conducted at an experimental forest in West Virginia is shedding light on how the carbon-storing ability of soils, and the billions of microbes within them, may fare as both carbon dioxide and nitrogen increase in the future.

The research, published recently in the journal Global Change Biology, examined how increased nitrogen affects the ability of forests and soil to store carbon.

“So in general, adding nitrogen to soils forests causes less decomposition, more soil carbon storage, but the mechanism for as to why that happens, again, largely unknown,” said Joe Carrara, a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Biology at West Virginia University and co-author of the paper. “Most research shows that it’s due to a decline in certain fungal guilds that are really good at breaking down lignin, or leaves or really recalcitrant, sort of hard to decompose soil organic matter.”

Humans have more than doubled the amount of nitrogen being deposited across ecosystems worldwide through the burning of fossil fuels and agriculture.

More nitrogen is on the way as developing countries invest in new coal-fired power plants. Carrara said understanding how nitrogen affects soils and ultimately the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can help scientists improve future climate change predictions.

In the summer of 2015, Carrara and the team spent a few days in the Fernow Experimental Forest near Parsons, West Virginia. They sampled soils in two parts of the U.S. Forest Service site — one area that has been left alone and another, which has been treated with nitrogen pellets since 1989.

“What we were interested in seeing is how the relationships between trees and these soil microbes, fungi, bacteria, mycorrhizal fungi, change under conditions with elevated nitrogen and can these relationships or changes in these relationships sort of give us some insight into why soil carbon decomposition goes down under elevated nitrogen,” he said.

The scientists found more nitrogen meant trees used less of their energy taking up carbon and creating things like roots. Bigger root systems mean more carbon stored underground. They found the trees also spent less carbon creating relationships with symbiotic, or beneficial, fungi that live in soils.

One surprising thing they found is that bacteria in the soil they sampled seemed to undergo changes when there was more nitrogen to contend with.

‘Mother Nature Threw Up on Wheeling, West Virginia’

West Virginia, as it turns out, is a great place to study this because of how close it is to the coal-burning power plants that have historically dotted the Ohio Valley. The state has some of the historically highest levels of past nitrogen deposition of course in the country.

“I think that the lowest ever recorded acid rain was actually in Wheeling, West Virginia,” Carrara said. “I don’t know exactly what the pH was, but it the same as stomach acid. One of our co-authors likes to say, I can’t remember what year it was, but he says basically mother nature threw up on Wheeling, West Virginia.”

Since the passage of the Clean Air Act, pollution in the U.S. has decreased and the amount of nitrogen falling onto forests and soils has dropped. But as developing nations bring coal-fired power plants and other manufacturing facilities online — which are sources of nitrogen — Carrara says it’s important to study how more nitrogen impacts soil carbon storage.

“This sort of gives us an idea of what, in the future, if nitrogen deposition is to continue to rise in some places in developing countries, places in the developing word, even some areas in the United States, how the forest will respond to that elevated nitrogen,” he said. “So, it’s sort of like speeding up the process so we can see now what the future might look like.”

Still, more research is needed to know how nitrogen fertilization worldwide might affect the total amount of carbon stored by soil worldwide, and thus serve as an important sink of carbon dioxide.

Carrara said the study helped illuminate the ways in which forests take up carbon dioxide and allocate it to different sorts of compartments in the forest like leaves and soils.

“Knowing that this link between the plants themselves and the microbes in the soils is important, provides us with some sort of mechanistic understanding of how nitrogen will impact where the carbon’s allocated in the forest,” he said.

For his next research study, Carrara hopes to take tackle more questions related to the forest soil micro biome. Last summer, he collected similar information in an experimental forest in Maine. Together with data from West Virginia, he says he hopes to soon know more about how different tree species that associate with the same fungi react to high levels of nitrogen.

The study was made possible in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Additional authors of the study include Christopher Walter at the University of Minnesota, Colin Averill of Boston University and Jennifer Hawkins, William Peterjohn and Edward Brzostek at WVU.