Greg Ruark, Assistant Director| Southern Research Station | 200 W.T. Weaver Blvd | Asheville, NC 28804

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Too Warm For Trout?
Can you imagine a future without trout swimming in mountain streams? A hundred years from now, the recreational fishing that many people enjoy in the Southern Appalachians could be a relic of the past.(More)

Going Up Turkey Creek: Modeling Water Availability in the Coastal Plain
On a mild, sunny June morning, Devendra Amatya stands near a State highway bridge on the bank of Turkey Creek, a gentle blackwater stream in South Carolina’s Coastal Plain. The creek winds through the Santee Experimental Forest, which is located within the Francis Marion National Forest at the headwaters of the east branch of the Cooper River...(More)

Southern Bats Like Hardwoods

Bats are one of the most numerous and diverse groups of mammals, existing on every continent except Antarctica. The world’s current bat fauna represents over 50 million years of adaptation to a variety of environmental conditions and unique niches...(More)

Keep That Water Moving
Millions of acres of land across the United States are polluted with wastes ranging from coal ash to spent uranium, on sites so toxic they're often fenced off from human and animal use, sometimes covered with nets to keep out birds...(More)

Restoration Project Wins Award
The 6-year cooperative effort to restore depressional wetlands on the Savannah River Site, which involved researchers, managers, and the public, received the 2006 USDA Forest Service Southern Regional Forester’s Natural Resources Stewardship Award.(More)

Constructing Wetlands to Improve Coastal Water Quality
South Carolina draws developers, residents, and visitors looking for a mild climate—development of previously wooded tracts of land is at an all time high along the coast. This rapid influx of people and development has brought waterquality problems to previously healthy coastal waterways—the result of both increased pollution and the loss of ecosystem services from the forests and wetlands that once protected coastal systems...(More)

T is for Texas...and TCE
Across the country in northcentral Texas, researchers from the SRS Coweeta Hydrological Laboratory in Otto, NC, used a more "individual" approach to find out how well cottonwoods cleanup an industrial solvent.(More)

Greening at the Seams
Chris Barton grew up in Kentucky, where mountaintop coal mining has definitely made its mark. Surfacemined land there has been compared to the surface of the moon; unlike the moon, there is water on the land, but it's usually been polluted by the acid drainage that forms when pyrite, the sulfide mineral found in coal seams, is exposed to air and water...(More)

Restoring Depressional Wetlands
The ephemeral nature of depressional wetlands creates tension. Will there be enough water to support plants and animals? If the ecosystem is disturbed, which species can survive? Which will repopulate spontaneously?(More)

Cleaning Up Our Act: Planting Trees to Clean Water
Much has been written about the birth of American forestry at the beginning of the 20th century as a response to a landscape laid waste by the timber and farming practices of European expansion. By the 1890s, the new Americans had logged, mined, and unsustainably farmed across the Southeast, leaving vast areas of soil denuded, compacted, and unable to filter rainfall.(More)

How Well Are We Restoring Wetland Functions?
The 2002 Farm Bill represented a landmark increase in conservation funding to help farmers and ranchers meet environmental challenges on their lands, including problems related to soil erosion, impaired water quality, and loss of wetlands and wildlife habitat...(More)

 

 

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