Suther Prairie in NC is an example of a wet prairie. Photo courtesy of Southeastern Grasslands Initiative. Thanks to some great progress in the Piedmont, the Southeastern Grasslands Initiative is piloting an approach for measuring public perceptions of grasslands right here in the Piedmont. There will be questions related to what people think [...]
You might remember the short videos on Piedmont prairies I wrote about a few months ago. As part of an effort to spread the word beyond the usual suspects, we submitted the short version of the video to the Longleaf Film Festival. The festival highlights short and feature-length documentary and narrative films with a connection [...]
This project explored landowner compliance with wildlife-friendly mowing recommendations and management to reduce woody encroachment in grasslands. Grassland photo by National Park Service. Okay, this paper is actually from Kentucky, but it provides a really interesting look at landowner compliance with terms of a grassland conservation program. We talk about landowner adoption rates [...]
Truck salting the roads. Photo by Kate Ter Haar, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0. Every winter, I wonder about the impacts of salting the roads on urban streams. We don't do it much around here, but it sure feels like a lot of salt. A recent paper looked a some of those impacts in [...]
The South Atlantic Blueprint is moving to a finer resolution this year. There are a number of cool things in the works for the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy (SECAS) this year. Not only is that great for the Southeast, and for those that also work in areas outside the South Atlantic, but there'll [...]
Toby Gray talking about The Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy (SECAS) at SePPCon 2020. Last week, I was able to make it to most of the Southeastern Partners in Plant Conservation (SePPCon) 2020 meeting. There were tons of great talks and discussions about cultural uses of plants, research, monitoring, private land, rights-of-way, genetics, communications, [...]
I've always been a sucker for the Piedmont. It's constantly overlooked in favor of the mountains and the coast. It's an underdog with a really interesting and poorly understood ecological history. The fact that most people don't know what the Piedmont used to look like is limiting conservation action in the Blueprint and is a [...]
This figure from the paper shows one of 10 experimental landscapes from the study, each containing a center fragment that is either connected or unconnected to peripheral fragments of open longleaf pine savanna surrounded by dense pine plantations. Photo credit: Google Earth 2019. So much connectivity work is about finding ways for large [...]
As you probably know by now, we're always working on ways to improve the South Atlantic Ecosystem Indicators. With a South Atlantic Blueprint update on the horizon for next year, we're putting some extra focus on those indicator improvements. We have a prioritized list of things to work on based on feedback from Blueprint users [...]
This deep-sea lizardfish was seen around 1,610 meters (5,282 feet) during the final dive of the Windows to the Deep 2019 expedition. Image courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, Windows to the Deep 2019. Sometimes I have a hard time wrapping my head around the depths of the ocean. [...]