On this West Virginia Morning, WVPB last spring covered efforts at Shepherd University to regrow American chestnut forests in Appalachia. One year later, that project has incorporated new technology and a familiar tree variant. Jack Walker caught up with a pair of self-proclaimed “chestnutters” to discuss the project at large, and the future of the American chestnut.
On this West Virginia Morning, WVPB last spring covered efforts at Shepherd University to regrow American chestnut forests in Appalachia. One year later, that project has incorporated new technology and a familiar tree variant. Jack Walker caught up with a pair of self-proclaimed “chestnutters” to discuss the project at large, and the future of the American chestnut.
Also, in this show, more than 4.5 million Americans cannot vote because they’ve been convicted of a felony. On the newest episode of Us & Them, host Trey Kay looks at the patchwork of state laws that restore voting rights to people after those convictions. The laws differ significantly from state to state. A few allow a person to vote from prison, while others require release and completion of probation or parole. Kay meets Anthony Cole who’s been out of prison for nearly a year after serving 12 and a half years. We listen to an excerpt from the next Us & Them: “Locked Out of Voting?”
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 Shepherd University.
Chris Schulz produced this episode.
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
The weather is getting cooler, the days shorter, and the leaves have started changing. Briana Heaney sat down with Park Ranger Dave Bieri at the Canyon Rim Visitor Center in the New River Gorge Park and Preserve recently to talk about why the leaves change and where to go to see some of those warm fall colors.
The weather is getting cooler, the days shorter, and the leaves have started changing. Briana Heaney sat down with Park Ranger Dave Bieri at the Canyon Rim Visitor Center in the New River Gorge Park and Preserve recently to talk about why the leaves change and where to go to see some of those warm fall colors.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Dave Bieri
Courtesy Dave Bieri/New River Gorge National Park
Heaney: Why do the colors change in the fall?
Bieri: So most of the year, deciduous trees look green. And that’s because of the production of chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is the pigment in the leaves that gives it that green color. And that’s used for photosynthesis which is basically the way that trees produce food. Throughout the year, the chlorophyll is giving the leaves their green color, and we don’t see some of the other pigments. So the fall comes along, and these trees stop their food production for the season. It is really related to the temperatures, but also the lack of sunlight in the fall. So when that chlorophyll shuts down, some of those other pigments start to show up. The yellows are pigments that are already in the leaves that start to show themselves, the reds have to do more with the sugars that are stored in the leaves. The trees that turn more of a red color have more sugar present in the leaves.
So different species of trees do turn different colors. When it gets cold the veins and those leaves seal off and the sugars are trapped in the leaves. And that’s what you’re seeing with the bright red and orange colors.
Heaney: What are the different elements that go into determining the fall foliage forecast?
Bieri: So there’s a lot of different variables, and I don’t think we totally understand all the variables that make for good fall colors. But the best thing in the fall is going to be some nice warm sunny days. And then cooler nights. It’s also good for having some precipitation in the springtime before the growing season earlier in the spring season. If we get a good wet spring, and then the fall comes along, you get some sunny days and cool nights. That’s what really will give you the best colors.
Heaney: What chemicals or elements make the warm, bright colors that we associate with autumn?
Bieri: So the carotenoids are the yellow pigments in the leaves, and those are pigments that are there year-round. Chlorophyll is what makes the green pigment and the chlorophyll, or lack of chlorophyll in the fall is what lends these other pigments to come out. The sugars in the leaves are really what gives it the red colors.
Heaney: How does precipitation affect the colors?
Bieri: So for precipitation, they say good precipitation in the springtime actually helps with fall foliage. It’s better during this time of year to get sunny weather as opposed to more rain.
Credit: Briana Heaney/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Heaney: How about rain during the fall?
Bieri: I don’t know that it’s as important for rain during the fall. Obviously, if you get some periods of drought, that may affect how soon leaves turn, but it really varies a whole lot depending on different species.
Heaney: Why do the trees change colors and fall in the autumn? And what role does this play in the lifecycle of a tree?
Bieri: So in the lifecycle of a tree, trees are plants that produce their own food. And they do that through a process called photosynthesis, where they’re taking sunlight and producing food. And a big part of that is the chlorophyll. That is the green pigments in the leaves. They use that to produce food. So when the leaves stop producing food, basically the tree stopped producing food in the fall. As the days start to get shorter, nights are getting longer, the temperatures are getting cooler, the trees stop producing food. So at that point, they’re not producing those green pigments anymore.
Heaney: What are some colors that we can expect from certain trees?
Bieri: So different trees produce different colors. I think some of the most brilliant colors here come from the maples. That’s where you get the really orange and red colors from the sugar maples and different kinds of maples here. Oak is usually more yellowish brownish, but the maples are probably the most vibrant of all the leaves here.
Heaney: Would you give me some more trees?
Bieri: The beech trees. I think they’re more the yellow pigments. And then you know what’s really neat here, too, is we have a mix. You also have some coniferous trees that are evergreens, you got rhododendrons all around here, which are all also evergreens. So you still have some of the green which really gives it a diversity of different color palettes here.
Heaney: How does the height of a tree or even the height of a branch of a tree affect how quickly the colors change?
Bieri: I don’t think the height of the tree would really affect how fast the colors change. What will affect color change is the elevation you know. The higher elevations in the park are where leaves are going to start to turn. They turn quicker in higher elevations in the park or places where it’s going to be a little bit cooler. Now the leaves are just starting to turn here at the Canyon Rim Visitor Center. But if you went up to Grandview, which is one of the higher elevations in the park, you’ll probably see a little bit more fall colors. Even just where I live in Beckley. I’m seeing more fall colors than here at Canyon Rim just because it’s a little bit higher in elevation.
Heaney: Yeah, that takes me to my next question. What is the timeline for some of the colors here in southern West Virginia? You mentioned a couple of those places, but what’s the timeline for the park?
Bieri: So it’s hard to predict exactly when leaves turn colors and is different every year depending on conditions. We usually say the middle of October is when we really start seeing the peak of fall colors in this part of West Virginia. But it varies and it starts at the higher elevations first. So right now, we’re seeing just a little bit of fall colors here at the Canyon Rim, where we’re sitting today, but if you go out to the higher elevations in the park — probably up at Grandview, you’re going to see a little bit more fall colors.
I think in another week or two we should really be getting into the peak. It’s already starting on the higher elevations further north in the state. The leaves are already getting close to peak in some places. So we’re probably another couple of weeks out if people want to see what the leaves are doing here. Before you plan to drive out here, we actually do have a webcam on our website. And the webcam is stationed right here at canyon rim visitor center focused into the gorge so you can kind of get a visual of what it looks like before you drive out here if you want.
Credit: Briana Heaney/West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Heaney: How will this year’s colors compare to last year’s colors, or years past?
Bieri: I think so far it’s looking like it’s going to be a good year. Just by the colors I’ve seen in other places where they’re starting to turn already.
Heaney: Tell me what are some trails here that visitors can hike on, or walk along that is going to give them spectacular views of the fall foliage.
Bieri: Really, you can see fall colors anywhere in the park, but some of the trails that take you out to the viewpoints are especially scenic this time of year. If you head out to Long Point or the Grandview rim trail up at Grandview those trails are going to give you those really beautiful panoramic views. And a lot of it depends on where the colors are when you visit. Again the higher elevations are where they’re going to be starting now. So right now I’d look for some of those trails like the Grandview rim trail up at Grandview, where it’s a little higher elevation, you’re gonna see more colors. But later on in the season, if you get here, it may be better, you know, at some of the trails that are down in the lower gorge. Like you know, Stone Cliff Trail running along the river might be a fun one for later in the season.
Heaney: What are some of those trails like?
Bieri: The other is the Stone Cliff trails, one that just runs right alongside of the river so you get some beautiful river views and with the fall colors, it’s even more beautiful at later points. One of the great trails right here by Canyon Visitor Center today, not to overlook, is the trail right across the street from us, is the Burnwood Loop Trail. Which is a small little trail that doesn’t get a lot of attention usually, but we’ve recently identified some old growth trees on there. So it’s a beautiful place to see some really big trees and a variety of different trees.
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
A large environmental project in Jefferson County is underway in Jefferson County, aimed at ensuring the safe future of area water supplies.
The West Virginia Rivers Coalition has planted nearly 900 trees and shrubs to protect the drinking water in the Harpers Ferry community.
The area, known as a riparian buffer, was planted along the Elk’s Run Watershed, which provides residents of the Jefferson County towns of Harpers Ferry and Bolivar with clean drinking water. It is also the only stream in the county that provides water to a municipality and drinking water to thousands of Harpers Ferry residents and tourists.
A riparian buffer is a natural strip of vegetation next to a stream or a creek that protects it from pollution. Not only does this help the environment, but it also improves the community surrounding it.
“We can’t have a thriving economy without clean water. Our businesses need it — we can’t have a thriving recreational economy,” said Tanner Haid, Eastern Panhandle field coordinator of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition. “This means everything to the people that live and work in this community.”
The organization, dedicated to protecting rivers and streams statewide, teamed up with local business owners and the Harpers Ferry Water Commission for this project as a public-private partnership. One local business owner, James Remuzzi of Shepherdstown-based Sustainable Solutions, helped provide the resources needed for the project. He thinks that the buffer brings ecological, economical and social benefit.
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
James Remuzzi, owner of Sustainable Solutions
“These types of projects help generate what we call green-collar jobs, so this idea that doing things like tree plantings, doing watershed improvement projects, actually generates jobs,” Remuzzi said.
Others who helped get the project off the ground include Barbara Humes, a member of the Harpers Ferry Water Commission, and Susannah Buckles, landowner of the Gap View Farm, which contains the headwaters of Elk’s Run.
Shepherd Snyder
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Barbara Humes, member of the Harpers Ferry Water Commission (left), and Susannah Buckles, owner of Gap View Farm (right).
“I think that this project serves as a great example of what could be done with other agricultural properties in the county,” Humes said. “I also think that it could serve as a way for the county ordinances to be looked at and perhaps revised in such a way that when a developer comes into a watershed area, that they could be more cognizant of how to protect open spaces in our zone of critical concern.”
Buckles is using her property to do just that. She thinks it is her responsibility as the landowner to give back to the planet and her community.
“As a landowner, we are stewards of the land, and we try to do the best we possibly can for our fellow living beings and the earth at large,” Buckles said. “I feel a great responsibility for that at this point in my life.”
Though this forest buffer has been finished, Buckles understands the importance of future projects around the state in order to better protect the state’s drinking water, as well as the land surrounding it.
“I think if more people understood the direct impact that these kinds of actions have in a positive way on our environment and our essential needs for water and air, I think that will go a long way towards having more of these projects available,” Buckles said.
The National Arbor Day Foundation has recognized West Virginia State University for the eighth consecutive year for its commitment to planting and caring for trees on its campus.
West Virginia State was the first institution in West Virginia to receive the designation of a “Tree Campus” back in 2014. WVSU is one of more than 400 other higher education institutions in the nation that have received the Tree Campus Higher Education award.
“West Virginia State has always been a beautiful campus, and to receive this acknowledgment for our efforts to be good stewards of our trees, and to recognize the important role they play in our landscape, is truly an honor,” said Urban Forestry Extension Agent Liz Moss in a press release.
Moss said she is in the process of establishing a teaching arboretum on campus, which would serve as a space for educating people about proper tree care.
Tree Campus Higher Education, an Arbor Day Foundation program, honors colleges and universities for effective campus forest management and for engaging staff and students in conservation goals.
WVSU achieved the title after meeting five standards. They include maintaining a tree advisory committee, a campus tree-care plan, dedicating annual expenditures for its campus tree program, an Arbor Day observance and a student service-learning project.
The university will celebrate the honor with a tree planting on its campus on Friday, April 30 at 3 p.m.
U.S. Forest Service district biologist Shane Jones stands on an overlook high up on West Virginia’s Cheat Mountain. Behind him lush, red spruce trees stand like sentinels on this frozen landscape. As he looks out, small patches of green dot what is largely a view of the barren, brown trunks of leafless hardwoods.
More than a century ago, this high-elevation ecosystem, now located inside the Monongahela National Forest, would have been dominated by the evergreen spruce. After being logged and suffering from fires in the 1880s through early 1900s, today an estimated 90 percent of this ice age-relic of an ecosystem has been removed from West Virginia.
And that has been a challenge for another iconic species: the West Virginia northern flying squirrel.
Credit Brittany Patterson / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
A rare stand of old red spruce trees in WV.
“We always say as the spruce goes the squirrel goes,” Jones said. As he hikes through a rare virgin patch of red spruce forest, he explains the interconnected relationship the northern flying squirrel and red spruce forest share.
Over the last decade, efforts to help both the squirrel and spruce recover are showing some promising signs, but that there is dispute about whether those efforts are enough.
Tight Relationship
A mature high-elevation red spruce forest will have a mixture of trees of different ages. There will be big trees, as well as fallen trees that create a hole in the canopy that allows smaller trees to grow. The diversity makes the forest resilient. The cool, moist climate of red spruce forests, coupled with the dead needles — or leaf litter — the trees shed, allow rich soils to build up on the forest floor.
“It’s completely different than the soil that develops under hardwood forests or other forests,” Jones said.
Credit Brittany Patterson / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Cavities in older trees provide shelter for the squirrels.
And it’s important fodder for mycorrhizal fungi, which develops on the root tips of red spruce trees in the deep organic soils created in these high-elevation forests. The layman’s term for these mycorrhizal fungi: truffles. And that is the meal of choice for the northern flying squirrel.
The small, nocturnal rodents are notoriously hard to catch. And they don’t actually fly, they glide, she said. The northern flying squirrel spent almost three decades under federal protection. In 2013, it became one of the few species to have its protections removed under the Endangered Species Act, a process known as delisting.
Recently, federal biologists released a status report for the West Virginia northern flying squirrel. It was largely optimistic. It found in the five years since delisting, the squirrels are still found across much of their range and in some new areas.
But not everyone is convinced the northern flying squirrel is thriving since its delisting. Noah Greenwald directs the endangered species program for the Center for Biological Diversity. The conservation group sued and won protections for the northern flying squirrel in the mid-2000s. He’s concerned wildlife managers don’t really know how many squirrels are out there.
Credit Jack Wallace / Courtesy WV DNR
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Courtesy WV DNR
A flying squirrel in flight.
“They just have some, you know, sort of somewhat sporadically collected information showing squirrels to be present or absent in different areas,” he said.
And he has concerns about the forest restoration work itself.
“They’re taking out these big hardwood trees that are part of the squirrels’ habitat and they’re planting young red spruce which aren’t currently habitat and won’t be for a while,” Greenwald said.
The small gliding rodent is notoriously challenging to trap, which is the traditional way biologists estimate population, said Diggins at Virginia Tech.
“In a perfect world, we would be able to catch a ton of squirrels and get an idea of population, but that’s not always possible for rare species,” she said.
Ugly Restoration
Back in the truck, Jones, the USFS biologist, begins driving to the Mower Tract, a 40,000-acre parcel of land owned for decades by the Mower Land and Lumber Company that was logged and mined for decades. In the 1980s, the land was purchased by the Forest Service and for the last decade, this has been where much of the red spruce restoration has been happening in the Monongahela National Forest.
At first glance, he concedes, it’s not the most pleasing picture.
“We call it ugly restoration,” he said with a laugh.
Credit Brittany Patterson / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
A young red spruce grows in the Mower Tract in WV.
Under its reclamation obligations, the company restored much of the Mower Tract. It bulldozed the land back into roughly its original shape and planted trees on the surface. To an outsider it looks like, well, forest.
But Jones points to signs the ecosystem here is not thriving. Trees have stopped growing and big, open patches of land show little sign of life besides some grasses. Soil testing in the region has confirmed a few centuries ago this land was red spruce forest. That is what Jones hopes it will be again.
To get there, the restoration staff tries to recreate conditions conducive to a healthy red spruce forest. Dozers are used to tear through the earth and break up the ground so tree roots can penetrate through the soil. Some of the existing hardwood trees are ripped out of the earth and left on the landscape to decay. These “snags” as biologists call them provide crucial animal habitat. Contractors also build wetlands.
About a year after this work is done, volunteers come in and plant a variety of species including red spruce. At one area of the Mower Tract, a few years old, knee high green baby spruce trees dot the brown landscape growing up among the twisted, decaying limbs of downed hardwoods.
“What we’re doing is we’re taking an area that was like a biological desert, stuck in arrested succession, the ground was compacted, and we’re putting it back into a forest that eventually, like a long time for now, will be a functional red spruce ecosystem,” Jones said.
Restoration work on the Mower Tract is a partnership between USFS, Green Forest Works and the Appalachian Regional Reforestation initiative. Since 2011, more than 760 acres have been restored and more than 350,000 plants planted in the Mower Tract. More than 150,000 red spruce have been planted, according to a project report released in 2019.
Jones said red spruce planted here have about a 90 percent survival rate.
Credit Brittany Patterson / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
U.S. Forest Service district biologist Shane Jones.
While re-establishing a red spruce ecosystem is the primary objective of the project, the work also creates early successional habitat, which supports hunting. The creation of wetlands helps with water quality and in the long term will boost the sequestration of carbon, Jones said.
The spruce restoration effort is also important in the face of climate change. Warming threatens the endangered ecosystem. Because of their status as high-elevation forests, they have little room on the landscape to shift northward as temperatures climb. Red spruce forests are also possible climate refugia for species that may flee lower elevation climates as they warm. The central Appalachian mountains are an important wildlife migration corridor, Jones said.
The work also increases the odds that one day the West Virginia northern flying squirrel will thrive here too. “I think 50 years [for] squirrels is not unrealistic,” he said.
