The SGI Blog
Anyone who has ever suffered the loss of a special place to “progress” can relate to this blog from SGI’s Chief Ecologist, Theo Witsell. “One of the biggest failures of the conservation movement is that sites that are small, or isolated, or expensive (which are often the rarest and most critical) get sacrificed.”
The Georgia State Botanical Garden and the Georgia Native Plant Initiative are collaborating through a host of programs to “cure plant blindness” in the state. This includes “resetting” the land toward diversity, preventing species extinctions, and providing “cues of care” to those who cannot yet recognize the beauty of a native grassland.
The flat to gently rolling surface of the Cumberland Plateau has grasslands, yet they are hard to come by today. Once common and widespread, these formerly open pine and oak savannas, prairies, glades, and acidic open wetlands have largely disappeared, and with them many of the species they supported. For this reason, the Tennessee Valley Authority is working with SGI to support an inventory and assessment of Rights-of-Way (ROWs) in the Cumberland Plateau, and field work began May 2019.
May 2019 marked the kick-off of SGI’s project exploring and documenting riverscour grasslands in the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area along the rugged and beautiful Clear Fork River. This work, funded by the National Park Service, will document the flora and plant communities of open habitats in the riparian corridor as well as map populations of rare and invasive species.
It was on the northeastern edge of the Southeast that Euro-American settlers first began the slow process of obliterating the ancient grasslands, and the loss of these ecosystems spread from here to the south and west. Many of these grasslands were gone before they could be described, studied by naturalists, painted, or photographed.
