Forests Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Native Plant Month Highlights Need To Protect Environment

West Virginia may be “wild and wonderful,” but not everything growing in our forests is supposed to be here. News Director Eric Douglas takes us on a nature walk in Kanawha State Forest to learn about the native and non-native plants right under our feet.

West Virginia may be “wild and wonderful,” but not everything growing in our forests is supposed to be here. There are many invasive plants that are crowding out the native ones.

Gov. Jim Justice proclaimed April as Native Plant Month as part of a national drive that got the movement going in just a few months time. The Kanawha Garden Club, the Garden Club of America and the Native Plant Society were behind the effort to achieve the designation.

Beverly Campbell, from the Kanawha Garden Club, explained that the effort began with an idea last spring in Columbus, Ohio. It only landed in West Virginia last November but spread quickly, landing on the governor’s desk this winter.

“This is to spread knowledge, awareness and education on native plants,” she said. “We have 42 states that have declared April as native plant month as of today.”

A native species to West Virginia that looks similar to bamboo. *Credit: Eric Douglas/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

She said there were approximately 200 Garden Clubs of America in the U.S. but only one in West Virginia and that is the one in Kanawha County.

The issue is twofold — recognizing what is native and supporting that while identifying the non-native species and keeping those in check. They can be harmful to the native species and wildlife.

“This display shows some of the more common non-native invasives in West Virginia,” said Luanne McGovern, the president of the West Virginia Native Plant Society. “And these are taking over in some places quite bad. Garlic Mustard, probably everybody has that beside the road or in their garden. Japanese Stiltgrass. I’ve seen this way out in the wilderness. It’s amazing how it’s just everywhere.”

She explained that forest ecosystems develop over thousands of years and the plants, bugs and birds evolve together. When non-natives come in, the animals don’t know what to do with it.

Non-native species find their way to West Virginia for a number of reasons. Some actually came here as packing materials in shipping containers.

One problem facing the native species is they may not be as aggressive growers or as prominent as some of the newly introduced varieties. During a recent walk in the woods, McGovern pointed out a small field.

A small iron deposit gives the waters of Davis Creek a rusty look with an oily sheen provided by bacteria that eat the iron. *Credit: Eric Douglas/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

“Here we have Trillium, Greek valerian, Celandine poppies,” she said. “Oh, there’s a blood root. Of course all the ferns grow together in this great wild. Geranium, violets I mean, all within like 10 feet, right in this fabulous ecosystem out here.”

Kanawha State Forest has an arboretum area where volunteers bring together native species and trees to highlight their contributions. Native Plant Society board member Chris Gatens pointed out one species that closely resembled a non-native plant, but actually had its origins in the same area as the forest.

“The Canebrake is a native woody grass,” he said. “And it’s native to the Davis Creek watershed and Kanawha County. This was from the restoration project probably 15 years ago. We obtained this from a flooded area on Campbell’s Creek and brought it over here and established it.”

The Canebrake closely resembles the Asian bamboo.

There are many commonly known invasive plants like multiflora rose, which was brought to the U.S. as natural fencing and just kept growing. But one many don’t realize is invasive is the Japanese honeysuckle that lines roadways all around the state. As Gatens said, “It’s been around a long time and it’s really hard on plants.”

He explained that honeysuckle and other vines like poison ivy climb up and choke out trees and shrubs.

“We’ve got a spicebush and it’s sort of suffering because this thing is over shadowing it,” he said. “And this is a bladdernut here. It’s a beautiful native shrub in the shady areas of the forest, and it’s being overtopped by this Japanese honeysuckle.”

Unfortunately, the only way to deal with most of the invasive species is manual labor, spraying, burning or pulling them up.

Gatens noted that when dealing with vines climbing trees, it is best to cut them out at the roots, but leave the vines attached to the trees. The tree will grow and push the vines out without damaging the tree bark.

Campbell did note that she carries a small, electric chainsaw with her to cut invasive vines at the base.

Invasive honeysuckle vines can choke out native trees. *Credit: Eric Douglas/West Virginia Public Broadcasting*

A Forest Project And Senators Reflect On 2023 Legislative Session On This West Virginia Morning

On this West Virginia Morning, with the 60-day legislative session over, lawmakers and West Virginians have a chance to reflect on what was accomplished – and look forward to what still needs to be done for the state. Chris Schulz covered the Senate all session and has one last look at the chamber’s activity.

On this West Virginia Morning, with the 60-day legislative session over, lawmakers and West Virginians have a chance to reflect on what was accomplished – and look forward to what still needs to be done for the state. Chris Schulz covered the Senate all session and has one last look at the chamber’s activity.

Also, in this show, the Allegheny Front, based in Pittsburgh, is a public radio program that reports on environmental issues in the region. We listen to their latest story about the “sunny oaks project” in Ohio and clear cutting.

West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.

Support for our news bureaus comes from West Virginia University, Concord University, and Shepherd University.

Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning

Staffing Jails And Celebrating Farms, Forests On This West Virginia Morning

On this West Virginia Morning, the state’s jail system is stretched to a breaking point. Even with various programs, incentives and pay raises to encourage more West Virginians to serve as correctional officers, there are still severe vacancies.

On this West Virginia Morning, the state’s jail system is stretched to a breaking point. Even with various programs, incentives and pay raises to encourage more West Virginians to serve as correctional officers, there are still severe vacancies.

Legislative reporter Chris Schulz sat down with Sen. Mike Caputo, D-Marion, and Del. David Kelly, R-Tyler, on The Legislature Today to get their take on the situation and moves in the West Virginia Legislature to help fix it.

Also, in this show, West Virginia’s farms and forests were on display Monday at the Capitol. Government Reporter Randy Yohe has more.

West Virginia Morning is a production of West Virginia Public Broadcasting which is solely responsible for its content.

Support for our news bureaus comes from West Virginia University, Concord University, and Shepherd University.

Listen to West Virginia Morning weekdays at 7:43 a.m. on WVPB Radio or subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. #WVMorning

Research Reveals Clean Air Makes Stronger Forests

Air pollution can actually cause forests to grow faster, as the nitrogen in acid rain is a fertilizer. The problem is, it makes the trees weaker and more susceptible to storm damage.

That’s according to West Virginia University postdoctoral researcher Chris Walter’s research into the subject. His research was made possible by the coincidence of a localized storm that hit directly on top of a forest research project. Walter’s paper was recently published in the journal Forests and he spoke with Eric Douglas to explain what it all means for West Virginia.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Explain the unique nature of how you were able to do this study in the first place.

Walter: At the Fernow Experimental Forest, they do a lot of research. It’s right outside of Parsons, West Virginia. And it’s located within the larger Monongahela National Forest. In 2009, there was a storm event with a microburst. It really only affected one side of the mountain. And it really hammered that area. And so we thought, maybe there’s some effects. We know there’s effects of acidification on trees and whether they make stronger or weaker wood. We know they grow taller, potentially, with more nitrogen. I thought maybe there’s some effects of this storm that we could test.

Douglas: What did you find when you studied what happened with the storm event?

Walter: Generally, across all the tree species that we studied, we saw that about 10 percent more trees were damaged by the storm overall. That was across all species. But when we looked a little closer at some of the species, particularly black cherry, which is a pretty high value timber species in our region, somewhere between 15 percent to 25 percent more trees were damaged in those treatments. Overall, we saw that any one tree would be damaged more. And then finally, there was this category of damage, where we rated the angle of the tree after it was damaged. If the tree was basically parallel to the ground, that was a pretty catastrophic event, whether it was snapped or bent over. So, what we found was that anywhere from 10 percent to 31 percent of these trees in the fertilized area were catastrophically damaged and weren’t going to grow back.

Douglas: What does this experiment tell us from what you’re seeing in the real world?

Walter: There’s two things that I think might be interesting. One is that our areas received historically high levels of this type of pollution. And so I think that we already have a good number of acidified forests in central Appalachia. We can somewhat argue that we’re already at elevated risk from our history of this type of pollution. That’s one aspect of it that I think is pretty interesting.

The second is that this fertilization is a ‘what if’ scenario. So, if we didn’t make the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, we would have continued on this trajectory of continual pollution. And so we can also use this and say if we hadn’t controlled our pollution levels, we would expect this type of damage to continue. It’s an argument that the Clean Air Act, amendments, may be making our forests more resilient.

Douglas: Those changes we made 30 years ago may have actually saved some of our forests and put them in better shape moving forward.

Walter: Absolutely and we see that in other research, too. There’s another group at West Virginia University that studies high elevation spruce. And they’ve seen a very large rebound in growth and vigor of trees. And so this aligns with that work. We’re making more vigorous and resilient forests, because we’re not fertilizing them. The final thing is there’s temperate forests similar to ours all over the world. One of the largest regions is China. And so there are areas in China outside of major cities that are polluting at rates that we never even experienced in America and basically fertilizing their forests at rates that you might expect in fertilized corn if you’re a farmer. There’s areas of the world that could be at risk of greater Storm Damage as well.

Douglas: We’re seeing situations with more extreme storms, more extreme weather events. How does that play into West Virginia forests moving forward?

Walter: The frequency of large magnitude storms is growing larger with climate change, mostly because the ocean is warming. There was a great paper that came out last year in Science. This paper showed that hurricane intensity after they reach landfall, they’re more powerful. They’re slower to decay in their power. All signs indicate that we’re going to be at more risk for damage from these types of storms, even in West Virginia.

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.

Researchers Uncovering W.Va.'s Human and Environmental History

A team of researchers at West Virginia University is creating a unique portrait of the Mountain State. The Historic Timbers Project is unveiling West Virginia’s human and environmental history one dusty old barn at a time.

On a cold November day, Kristen de Graauw and Shawn Cockrell are climbing around an old barn near Hillsboro in Pocahontas County. Kristen is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography at WVU and the project manager for the Historic Timbers Project. Shawn is the lab manager for the Montane Forest Dynamics Laboratory at WVU and the lead technician for the project.

The project has two, interrelated goals: to figure out what the pre-settlement forests of West Virginia were like and to date historic structures.

Since there aren’t many old trees left, the only way to figure out what the forests of West Virginia used to be like is to take core samples from old logs that settlers used to build barns, cabins, and houses.

Today, Kristen and Shawn are exploring a barn owned by the McNeel Family to determine if it’s a candidate for tree-ring dating. The barn is the size of a large two-story house and made of big faded brown logs.

They are searching the structure for tree bark so they can determine if there are enough logs to take samples from to accurately date the structure. A log is a good candidate sampling if it still has bark on it because that means they know the outermost layer of the log is intact.

Which is important because they use dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, to determine the age of the structures. Kristen explains how it they use tree rings to date structures.

“If we having a living tree that’s a really old, maybe it’s a three hundred years old tree, but it’s living,” she said. “If we take a sample out of that, we know that the outer date on our sample is the year that we’re currently in. Then we are able to count back through time and figure out what the inner most date is on that tree is. We can then compare our log structure data we have with those tree rings and find the overlap between that living tree and that log structure were the patterns lock in.”

Kristen and Shawn speak with Bill McNeel from the Pocahontas County Historical Society outside of a barn build by his ancestors.

Shawn adds that the process is exciting for the researchers and the building owners.

“We meet people just as enthusiastic as we are, but coming from a different angle,” he said. “We’re enthusiastic because we’re gaining access to this great storage of ecological data and the people who own these structures get us to come in and take the sample and tell them an inferred construction date. Everyone is just as excited as the next person.”

After their initial survey, the researchers will return in the summer and use drills to take core samples from the logs. From these samples, they can gather not only an inferred building date of the structure, but also a lot of data about the environment that the tree grew it.

Kristen says she can determine a lot from looking at tree rings.

“I can look at a tree ring and see the growing season and dormant season of that tree. So it’s not just annual data that we’re look at. We’re looking at seasonal differences,” she said.

Which is really important because there aren’t many other ways to gather this kind of data in West Virginia due to heavy logging during the turn of the 20^th century.

Kristen is working on this project as part of her dissertation. However, she didn’t start with the idea of working with historic structures in West Virginia. Her initial research sent her to Mongolia to investigate ancient forests, but that wasn’t for her.

“It was great but my heart wasn’t in it,” she said. “But what I do know is that I like West Virginia. I like historic structures and I like the idea of knowing what our forests used to look like.”

And she couldn’t be happier with her decision to work in West Virginia.

“It was kind of amazing. Now I’m doing what I want to do. I’m enjoying it. I’m motivated. I’m excited.”

Shawn and Kristen walk around the Kee Cabin on the grounds of the Pocahontas County Historical Society Museum in Marlinton later that afternoon as they work to determine if the property can be tree-ring dated.

They have already worked on dating five structures in Greenbrier, Pendleton, Pocahontas and Preston counties with more buildings set to be dated this summer. The inferred building data of the structure is then used by individuals and groups working to list the structures on the National Register of Historic Places or apply for grants to aid in preservation.

Kristen says this provides researchers with often-overlooked environmental data held in the logs.

“The people who go in and date historic structures, I don’t think that they’re even thinking about it. Not only can we date this barn, but this whole barn was a forest and it’s just sitting there. It’s archeology now.”

Historic Timbers Project will continue its work this summer with support of the West Virginia Humanities Council and the Montane Forest Dynamic Lab at WVU.