 United
States Department of Agriculture -
Forest Service |
 Southern Research Station200 Weaver Boulevard P.O. Box 2680 Asheville, NC 28802 |
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SRS Researchers Collaborate on Upper Charleston County Project
Marianne Burke, research ecologist with the SRS Center for Forested Wetlands Research in Charleston, South Carolina, has received a $10,000 grant from the Washington Office of the US Forest Service as partial funding for a collaborative project to introduce a new environmental science program into the public schools of upper Charleston County, South Carolina. The project will also conduct a study on the future of a rural coastal community threatened with urban sprawl.
Upper Charleston County lies north of the city of Charleston in the coastal plain between the Sewee and Santee Rivers. Once covered with rice plantations, the area is still mostly rural and its residents predominantly African American. Though a large part of the county lies within the Francis Marion National Forest, African American residents rarely use this resource, nor do they tend to be involved in land-use decisions.
Burke's project will provide support to a new environmental science program for the public schools of McClellanville, the main town in the area. Two of three new curriculum units will be developed with the assistance of Joan Walker, SRS Endangered, Threatened, and Sensitive Wildlife and Plants unit in Clemson, South Carolina, and Susan Cohen, SRS Biological Foundations of Southern Forest Productivity unit in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Project collaborators hope that introducing students to the ecology and management of the forests in their immediate environment will help to raise the interest of area residents in land use planning.
The second part of the project, the feasibility study, will examine the social, economic, policy, and ecological implications of different land management scenarios for the county. Cassandra Johnson, from the SRS Recreation, Wilderness, Urban Forest, and Demographics Trends Research unit in Athens, Georgia, will help integrate the social information into the land use study. The project will also support a graduate student in the University of Charleston Environmental Sciences program, who will help coordinate the partners involved in the study, initiate new partnerships, and write the analysis report as a master's thesis. The information collected for the analysis will be presented to the rural landowners.
The project's multiple partners include: the McClellanville public schools, McClellanville YMCA, Charleston County Public School District, Sewee Santee Community Development Cooperative, South Carolina Forestry Commission and Department of Natural Resources, Sustainable Soils, L.C.C., USDA Forest Service Francis Marion and Sumter National Forests, SRS Santee Experimental Forest, NOAA's National Oceanic Service and National Marine Fisheries, and the South Carolina Sea Grant program.
For more information: Marianne Burke at (842-766-0371 x118) or mburke@fs.fed.us
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