As I mentioned last month, we're partnering with the wonderful folks at the Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center (SE CASC) to put on a great webinar series this April through July! These webinars will take place in our usual South Atlantic Third Thursday Web Forum Series time slot, on the third Thursday of every month [...]
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 [...]
We have some great speakers lined up for the Third Thursday Web Forum this spring and summer! Starting next month, we're collaborating with the Southeast Climate Adaptation Science Center (SE CASC) to bring you a series of presentations on SE CASC projects relevant to conservation in the South Atlantic region. While we put the finishing [...]
The Rim Fire burned 256,000 acres of Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park in 2013. Photo by USDA Forest Service/Chris Stewart, CC BY 2.0. Staying on track to meet the SECAS goal will take some creative approaches for funding management actions--especially in the fire-dependent ecosystems of the South Atlantic. Through SECAS, the [...]
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 [...]
New data release! Gopher tortoise is one of five at-risk herps modeled in new habitat suitability maps. Through a massive, collaborative effort with Federal, State, and other partners, we have completed range-wide habitat suitability models (also called species distribution models) for five at-risk species of herpetofauna associated with the longleaf pine ecosystem. These [...]
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 [...]