Ecosystems Research at Fort Benning Supports Sustainable Land Use

By Dana Finney

On a typically hot Georgia day, infantry trainees at Fort Benning fire on a small arms range, mechanized units thunder down tank trails in Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and C-130s roar overhead carrying Airborne squads to a jump site. Meanwhile, a student from the University of Louisiana slogs through Ochillee creek and uses a special instrument to sample bottom muck ? material that scientists hope will offer clues into how healthy the fort's streams are.

Fort Benning has become a test bed for ecosystems research under the Defense Department's Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP). An effort called the SERDP Ecosystem Management Project (SEMP) has more than 20 researchers from twelve universities and four government laboratories taking the post's environmental pulse from some 800 monitoring sites. The goal is to ensure Benning's ability to sustain its training mission over the long term through a better understanding of ecosystem dynamics, which will be applied to land management practices.

"SEMP will give us and other installations the ability to look within and outside our boundaries using an ecosystems approach," said John Brent, chief of the Environmental Management Division in Fort Benning's Directorate of Facilities Engineering and Logistics. "In the past, we've managed individual species and habitats in a focused, but not integrated, way. SEMP will give some order to the way we do things, and will reach beyond just natural resources to include social and political aspects of ecosystem management."

The research will produce two main outcomes, according to Dr. Harold Balbach, SEMP program manager at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center's Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL). One is to add to the body of scientific knowledge about ecosystems by publishing peer-reviewed documents. The second is to give land managers tools for making sound environmental decisions.

"The long term goal is to provide installation environmental managers with models, indicators, and simple tests that can tell them if the decisions they're making are trending in the right direction, and how long it will take to reach the desired state," Balbach said. "Over the 10-year project, researchers will first identify a list of conditions that could be indicators of change, or thresholds that signal a major ecological change is about to happen. Then they will pare that list down to a small number of manageable indicators that the installation can use on a practical basis."

Fort Benning was chosen as the SEMP demonstration site in part because of the large amount of environmental data already available there and also because of its rich diversity in plant and animal life. Findings from the research at the post will later be extended to areas outside the fence line ? to include the entire fall line region between Forts Benning and Bragg, Brent said.

Research and Training: A Balancing Act

How do you do environmental research on a major military training installation? Any disruption to the training mission would defeat the purpose of research to sustain Fort Benning, since it only exists to train soldiers and project power. Yet SEMP involves intensive field work to monitor test sites located all over the training areas.

"We have to control access to the different training compartments for safety and to avoid interfering with the units going in to train," said Hugh Westbury, SEMP's host site coordinator. "If we're going to keep SEMP on track, we have to make sure we aren't causing any problems for the unit leaders or Range Control."

Westbury's office is co-located with the Range Division and he works closely with schedulers to coordinate researcher site trips with training activities. The Range Control office is a veritable war room, where Chief of Operations Warren Greenlee presides over huge maps marked up every day with hundreds of activities supporting the post's 24-hour-a-day training mission.

"Fort Benning is a busy place, and we're unique in that we train both Forces Command and Training and Doctrine Command units," said Greenlee. "We also have the Infantry School and Ranger School, and Reservists come here to train in the summer."

Westbury serves as a single point of contact for all research activities requesting range access. This avoids confusion from having multiple requests and detailed contact information that would have to be entered into the Range Facility Management Scheduling System (RFMSS). Over the past year, he arranged more than 1,300 research field visits with no safety incidents or impact on training. "Despite a busy training schedule, researchers are actually on the ranges more frequently than most troop units," he said.

At Home on the Range

Back at Ochillee Creek, two students standing waist-deep in water call out numbers to Mark Farr from ERDC's Environmental Laboratory. Their research seeks to characterize the physical and biological condition of Fort Benning's streams. "Land use practices ? training, transportation, infrastructure, and so on ? vary across the post," Farr said. "Effects of these land-based practices can ultimately change natural stream conditions."

Another goal of Farr's project is to learn what physical and chemical factors most influence macro-invertebrate ("bug") populations. The types of "bugs" found in streams are good indicators of water quality and therefore, stream health.

"The ultimate goal of this study is to design a management plan for individual streams based on which environmental factors are most important given the adjacent land use," Farr said.

At another site, Dr. John Dilustro, a post-doctoral fellow from the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, checks plots where his team assesses the effects of land management practices on vegetation. Using both high- and low-tech instruments, his students take the air and soil temperature, remove core samples from trees, examine detritus in pine needle collection bags, and count the number of plant species per plot.

One ongoing management practice of top interest in the study is Fort Benning's habitat restoration program for the Red-cockaded Woodpecker (RCW). Through a combination of controlled burning, logging, and marking longleaf pine trees, environmental managers are creating additional habitat for the endangered RCW. While this process solves an immediate problem ? compliance with the Endangered Species Act ? its long-term effects are unknown.

"Of Fort Benning's 150,000 acres of forested land, we manage 90,000 for the Red-cockaded Woodpecker," said Brent. "We burn 30,000 acres every year to restore habitat, but we don't know what future impacts that may have on other species, the soil quality, vegetation emergence, and so on."

According to Westbury, prescribed burns promote seed germination of pyrophytic vegetation in the first season. In subsequent burnings, longleaf seedlings sprout top branches and thrive following the reduction of understory that competes for nutrients. This macro-scale management successfully creates conditions ideal for the longleaf pine ecosystem, the preferred habitat for the RCW. "Burning is also good for providing forage for wildlife and it's good for the troops training on foot," he said.

Dilustro's project seeks indicators at the microscopic level that will give managers information about the long-term viability of such practices.

"We can harvest the top layer of decaying matter in an area to check its mass and nutrient content and determine nitrogen and carbon cycles before and after controlled burns," Dilustro said. "This will show us thresholds of disturbance that may be important to the future health of the ecosystem."

Another species of concern on Fort Benning is the gopher tortoise, whose eastern populations (Georgia and Florida) are not federally listed as threatened or endangered, but are being monitored by the State of Georgia. This tortoise likes sandy soils relatively clear of vegetation ? like the entire upland range complex that now supports tracked vehicle training.

"SEMP will engage the community as we look at those factors affecting the gopher tortoise," said Brent. "If we're doing something with an impact or people outside the boundary are eating up habitat, we need to develop strategies to prevent it from being listed and creating training restrictions."

"If the eastern population becomes listed as threatened or endangered," said Balbach, "the 3^rd Brigade will have to sit in their barracks and watch videos."

The Challenges Ahead

The SEMP initiative addresses complex issues in ecosystem management, and the task will not become any easier over the remaining years of the project. In addition to finding the right relationships that define disturbance and risk, the installation's activities and environment are dynamic. According to Westbury, two new training requirements will have environmental effects that will have to be understood and mitigated: a digital multi-purpose training range and the Stryker armored vehicle being fielded by the Integrated Brigade Combat Team.

"The Stryker is a wheeled vehicle that is heavier on the ground than some of the armor we have training here now," said Westbury. "It could have a totally different pattern of land use than the tracked vehicles." The first Stryker vehicle appeared on Fort Benning in June 2002.

Another challenge for SEMP will be in providing land managers with guidance on actions to take, given an indicator that shows impending ecosystem change or a mission to effect some improvement. "What do people actually do to bring about changes they want to happen in the environment?" said Balbach. "Let's say a reach of a creek is found to have unsatisfactory conditions. How do you change it?"

Ultimately SEMP will answer such questions and provide managers with practical, easy-to-use tools for managing Fort Benning at the ecosystem level. According to Brent, "The diversity and brain power of the researchers working on SEMP is incredible. We have some of the best minds in the country working together toward a common goal."

For more information about SEMP, please contact Dr. Harold Balbach at CERL, 217-373-6785, email Hal.E.Balbach@erdc.usace.army.mil.