The SGI Blog
While botanists have been exploring the Cumberland Gap for decades, some areas remain seldom visited. Martin’s Fork, a boggy tributary to the Cumberland River which originates in the higher elevations of the park, is one such area. During a 2021 survey of the area, SGI’s Southern Appalachian Grasslands Coordinator, Zach Irick, made an exciting discovery: a population of the federally endangered white fringeless orchid (Platanthera integrilabia).
On June 18, Artemis Sportswomen, the Tennessee Wildlife Federation, and the Southeastern Grasslands Initiative hosted a field trip to Catoosa Wildlife Management Area for women in conservation. The purpose of the field trip was to learn about the conservation and importance of Tennessee’s vanishing savannas and other grassland ecosystems. It was a perfect day for a field trip. The heat and humidity of the week before had broken and left in its place one of those rare, cool, summer days filled with sunshine and a constant breeze.
The Soak Creek Savanna Restoration Project consists of approximately 375 acres that had been clear cut on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. Approximately half of the area was recently burned, while the other half was burned in 2021. This project is being conducted in conjunction with TennGreen Land Conservancy, Panther Creek Forestry (PCF), and Austin Peay State University (APSU).
In early May I made the familiar drive east across Tennessee for a week of field work in and around the large Tennessee Valley Authority powerline corridors that cross the surface of the Cumberland Plateau. This work is part of a multi-year study looking at the value of these open rights-of-way to grassland biodiversity, specifically to plants and their insect pollinators.
Over a century ago the botanist and Presbyterian minister Thomas Conrad Porter collected a rather elusive plant in Jasper County, Georgia (southeast of Atlanta). Upon collecting it, T.C. Porter identified it as one species. Half a century later in 1902, his nephew, the famous botanist John Kunkel Small, author of the original Flora of the Southeastern United States, took another look at his uncle’s collected specimens. He recognized the specimen as a species new to science and named it after his esteemed uncle – Solidago porteri, or Porter’s Goldenrod. After that, T.C. Porter’s pressed plant specimens sat nestled away in the New York Botanical Garden Herbarium and were promptly lost to the annals of history. That is, until another century and change later when SGI’s Executive Director Dwayne Estes discovered a new population in south-central Tennessee nearly 250 miles from where T.C. Porter originally collected it in Georgia in 1846.
The “Plants, Pollinators, and Powerlines” study we are conducting with our partners at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the Mississippi Entomological Museum, and the Electric Power Research Institute was revived in 2021 after being on hiatus in 2020 due to the COVID pandemic. I’ve been busy the last month identifying specimens and analyzing botanical data from our 2021 field season.
In October, Dwayne Estes, Michelle McInnis, and Zach Irich of SGI went exploring a beautiful 4.5 mile section of Clear Creek Gorge. Their work had two main aspects, one led by Michelle and one by Zach. Michelle is leading a study of the riverscour grasslands while Zach is surveying the river for aquatic native plant beds (not grasslands per se but helps fund exploration of the river which puts us in contact with the riverscour). But riverscour is extremely treacherous and requires a high degree of planning, something that Dwayne was unpleasantly reminded about.
