Events prior to 2005

On Wednesday, December 15, 2004 a group of students from Ms. Chris Robie's High Meadows School classes spent the morning learning about longleaf.  It was a beautiful, sunny and clear day.  We heard Sandhill Cranes flying over head while standing in one of our Mountain Longleaf stands.  Below is a picture taken at the Old Mill following the visit!

On Monday April 26, 2004 a group of 75 students in Ms. Robina Gallagher's Armuchee Middle School classes spent an afternoon learning about longleaf, about prescribed burning, and walking the Longleaf Trail.  Below find a photo of the group at the entrance to the trail:

On Friday April 16, 2004 a group of students from Ms. Simpkin's Armuchee Middle School class participated in National Youth Service Day.  They spent the entire day helping work on the Longleaf Trail -- and did an absolutely fantastic job!!  Below, find some pictures of the day's event.

   

On  Friday Nov. 21, 2003, we worked on installing signs and doing other work on our longleaf interpretive trail .  We would like to thank those who participated that day:  Jen Bottinick, Lindsay Crider, James Kane, George Frye, Carly Donahue, Sarah Stephan, Bill Davin, Renee Carleton, Melanie Belk, Ian Mathorp, Susan Conradsen, Dean Wilson, Kenneth Price, and two land resource student workers.

In mid-winter 2003, we finished work on our Berry Longleaf Interpretive Trail, which was funded by the GA-DNR.  This trail winds its way through areas under management and is supplemented by benches and educational signage.  Many groups have since visited the trail on their own and via guided walks.

Using seeds collected in October 2003, we initiated a seedling production project which ultimately produced our first “crop”of 200 containerized seedlings.  These seedlings were subsequently planted to recently burned areas within our core management area.

In March 2004, in collaboration with Kirk Hinson (Southern Seed Company) and George Gallagher (Berry College Animal Sciences), we initiated a seed orchard project intended to generate Mountain Longleaf seeds via grafted clones of our oldest longleaf trees.  Our intent is to preserve the genetic diversity present in those old trees and to generate seeds for use in our own and other regional longleaf restoration projects.  We thank the U.S. Forest Service for use of their scalping plow.  So far, the 200 plus root-stock plants are doing well on about 2 fenced acres.  Grafting experiments with previously established root-stock plants will begin this winter, with help from Andrea Jones and Marlin Cox (Berry College Horticultural Greenhouses and Animal Sciences program).

In April 2004, we conducted our second restoration burn within our old-growth mountain longleaf stands.  The first burn (in 2003) encompassed only about 4-5 acres, whereas this year’s burn encompassed about 80 acres.  Only a few stands of old-growth longleaf presently remain outside of burned areas.  We have followed up this year’s burn by establishing a study that will attempt to correlate duff damage, flame height, and leaf scorch to long-term growth and mortality in individually marked trees.  Even though more litter and duff was removed than we had considered optimal, only two trees (whose interiors caught fire via trunk scars) have died so far following this burn.  I once again thank the Interagency Burn Team spearheaded by Neal Edmondson (GA Forestry Commission) for the team’s part in planning and implementing this burn.  Participating agencies included the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, GA Department of Natural Resources, and The Nature Conservancy.  We could not have carried out this burn without their help.

In April 2004, students Melanie Belk and Carly Donahue completed an analysis of fuel loads and fire hazards based upon field data collected in our old-growth stands.  The results were presented at the GA Academy of Sciences meeting at Berry College:

2004.  Belk, M., C. Donahue, and M. L. Cipollini.  An analysis of standing fuel loads within the Berry College Longleaf Management Area, Floyd County, GA.  Abstracts: Georgia Academy of Sciences Annual Meeting, Berry College , Mount Berry , GA.  March 22-24, 2004.

Abstract:  In order to obtain an accurate assessment of available fuel prior to planning prescribed burns or when assessing wildfire risk, it is necessary to measure duff, litter, and herbaceous, live woody, and dead woody materials in an efficient and reproducible manner. Standard methods have not been generally established for forests in the southeast United States. Adopting a U.S. Forest Service point-sampling technique for western U.S. forests, we assessed fuel conditions within an area on campus designated for prescribed burning, including the estimation of parameters that reflect local conditions (e.g., biomass/basal area relationships for local shrub species). This area is in the heart of a newly established management area where remnant longleaf stands are being restored via the reintroduction of prescribed fire. Our hope is that this approach may prove generally useful to public and private landholders concerned with the estimation of ground-level fuels in southeastern forests, particularly those in the Mountain Longleaf region.

In April 2004 two groups of Armuchee Middle School students visited our newly completed Longleaf Trail and helped with trail maintenance while learning about longleaf.  I also gave a seminar for one of the groups prior to having them visit the site.

This past summer, two students associated with our newly established NSF-REU program in Ecology and Environmental Biology conducted research on the Berry Longleaf project: Amy Gaskell (Stephen Austin Univ., TX) and Chris Worrell ( Berry College ).  The following paper was presented by Amy at the 2004 Longleaf Alliance meeting (an updated version will also be presented at the 2005 Association of Southeastern Biologists meeting).

AMY GASKELL¹, CIPOLLINI, MARTIN², AND  CHRISTOPHER WORRELL².  Stephen F. Austin University¹, and Berry College²  --Use of herbicide and prescribed burning to control hardwoods in the regeneration and restoration of Mountain Longleaf Pine habitats.

Abstract:  Hardwood control is a problem in the regeneration and restoration of Longleaf Pine (Pinus palustris) stands.  Data concerning hardwood management techniques are generally lacking for Mountain Longleaf Pine habitats in NW Georgia and NE Alabama .  In this study, three experiments were set up on the Berry College campus to evaluate the effects of herbicide and prescribed burning in hardwood control:  1) an evaluation of Garlon 3A in the control of hardwood re-sprouts in a clear-cut area planted with Mountain Longleaf Pine seedlings; 2) an evaluation Arsenal injection in the control of hardwoods in mature Mountain Longleaf Pine stands, and; 3) an examination of the effects of a spring prescribed fuel reduction burn in mature stands.  In the first experiment, hardwoods were treated by foliar spray in June 2004, and effects measured four weeks later.  In the second experiment, hardwoods in five mature stands were injected in March 2004 and effects measured in July 2004.  In the third experiment, fuel analyses were taken before and after an April 2004 prescribed burn (two study stands), and from burned and unburned areas (three study stands).  Hardwood re-sprouts reacted differently to Garlon 3A, with certain species (e.g., Sweet-gum) showing resistance to the herbicide.  The Arsenal injection results were confounded by the prescribed burn, but Red Maple was significantly negatively affected by the herbicide treatment independent of the effects of burning.  Finally, fuel analysis showed limited effects on the abundance of small hardwoods despite considerable reduction of litter, duff and downed woody fuels.

The extended abstract of the above presentation will be published in the next Longleaf Alliance Report.

In August 2004 we initiated a collaborative study with Troy Knight ( University of Arizona ) to correlate variation in annual growth rate to historical records of large-scale storm events (hurricane and ice-storm damage).  Trees have been cored in six study stands and Troy is presently processing those cores.  The cores will also help us to better evaluate the ages of trees within our old-growth stands.

The Berry College Freshman Seminar class of Dr. John Graham worked on the Berry Longleaf Trail in a work/learn service project in August 2004.

Sometimes hurricanes bring good news!  One of the several hurricanes that blew through the south actually helped our project by blowing down many longleaf cones at the peak of ripeness in early October.  Scrambling to beat the squirrels to the booty, we were able to collect over 300 cones and process several thousand seeds, which will be used in our seedling generation project.  Data from these cones will also give us a much better idea of the number of viable seeds per cone within our study stands. Berry students Chris Worrell and John Oliver are working on this project and continue to care for our seed orchard.

Our project was highlighted at the October 22, 2004 Outdoor Classroom Symposium, which was held at Berry College .  I gave two lecture/to