SIGHTLINE

SUMMER 2001
Vol. 2 No. 1

AIR
The Acid Test

HUMAN INTERACTION
Back to the Future

WILDLIFE
Deviant Behavior

WATER
Aquatic Insects on the Frontline

INVASIONS
Big Hogs, Big Problems

VEGETATION
Managing the Land

BIODIVERSITY
Campaign to Identify Smokies' Species Continues

SIGHTLINE
is published on behalf of
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
by the
Energy, Environment and Resources Center (EERC)
at the
University of Tennessee.

EERC conducts research designed to promote real-world solutions to problems in the fields of energy, environment, technology, and economic development.

.

SIGHTLINE is sponsored by:

Friends of Great Smoky Mountains National Park

and

Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association

Cades Cove photos courtesy of Nick Gary

SIGHTLINE

SUMMER 2001
Vol. 2 No. 1

AIR
The Acid Test

HUMAN INTERACTION
Back to the Future

WILDLIFE
Deviant Behavior

WATER
Aquatic Insects on the Frontline

INVASIONS
Big Hogs, Big Problems

VEGETATION
Managing the Land

Back to main page

Managing the Landscape

Land management plans preserve the beauty, specialness of the Smokies

BY DENNIS McCARTHY

When the National Park Service acquired land in the 1930s for the newly created Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Cades Cove-the largest valley in the Park-was a stunning landscape of open farmland, meandering brooks, scattered woodlands, and wetland meadows, all crowned with a ring of mountains. To the families that lived there before the Park bought them out, the Cove was the closest thing to heaven on Earth they would ever see.

The National Park Service, too, appreciated the beauty of the new parkland and wanted to preserve it for future generations. The challenge was to devise effective management plans that would withstand the vicissitudes of changing science. Since much of the Park's vegetation does not mature for scores or even hundreds of years, the Park could not afford to make short-sighted management decisions based on fad.

No plan, of course, can be permanent; so over the years, the Park has had to contend with a variety of management challenges, whether meadows or wetlands or exotic infestations or endangered species or grassy balds or any of dozens of other problems that have presented themselves.

Splendor in the Grass
The original management plan for the new Park called for Cades Cove and other cultivated lands to return to a natural forested setting. As the Cove began to fill with shrubs and trees, however, something unexpected happened-it began to lose its specialness. So much of the beauty of the Cove, it turned out, depended on the open vistas the farmers had created. Without the vistas, the Cove appeared, well, almost ordinary.

To preserve the openness, the Park invited farmers back to the Cove to work the fields and to raise cattle and crops. Over the years, the Cove has changed, of course, but its open, rural character has remained. Today the farmers are gone. The last resident, Kermit Caughron, died in 1999 at the age of 96.

And that left the Park with a quandary. How should it continue to manage the Cove? The fields in the Cove were populated with tall fescue, a European native brought into the Cove 50 years ago. While fescue was popular at the time because it is a hardy winter grass, it turned out to have some major problems. An endophytic fungus found in most tall fescue is harmful to horses, cattle, and some game animals. Fescue also makes poor cover for wildlife, especially during the winter when snow and freezing rain knock the grass over, and the thick matting presents an impenetrable fence to small mammals that live at the grass-soil boundary.

Getting rid of the fescue, therefore, seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately, the native grasses-big and little bluestem, purple top, Indian grass-that preceded the fescue had all but disappeared. One old field near the western end of the Cove, however, had not been mowed for 30 years and still had stands of native grass. The Park therefore began propagating grasses from these stands to replace the fescue.

Beginning in 1995, three sites were selected for conversion to native grasses. The sites were burned and sprayed with herbicides to remove fescue and other exotic plants. These sites, which now support native grasses, will be monitored for a few years before the Park decides whether to expand the conversion to other fields in the Cove.

Of Wetlands and Canebrakes
The Park is also restoring some of the Cove's wetlands that were ditched and drained in the 1950s and 1960s to create pasture. With grants from Target, the retail giant, and the Fish and Wildlife Fund, the Park selected three sites for restoration. Ditches were plugged with dirt and stabilized with bundles of willow sticks. As the willows sprout and root, they help hold the soil in place. Today, water no longer is confined to the ditches. It meanders across the meadows to create a true wetland again.

Cades Cove is not the only area where the Park is restoring native vegetation. Near the Park's Oconaluftee Visitors Center, adjacent to the Cherokee Reservation, a native canebrake is being reestablished.

Today, only small, isolated stands of cane remain in the region. Two hundred years ago, however, canebrakes were common along streams in the region. Early travelers wrote of stands that ran for dozens of miles along river bottoms, where a man on foot could easily elude his pursuers. These stands were home for deer, bear, and other game that the Cherokee depended on for food. The cane was-and still is-used in making beautiful baskets, which the Cherokee are justly famous for.

Vanishing Act
At one time, the American chestnut was the most valuable tree in the eastern United States. Its tall straight trunks made excellent construction beams, railroad ties, ships' masts, and telephone poles. Its strong, light-weight lumber made fine furniture, and its rot-resistant wood made fence posts that could last for generations. Two-thirds of the tannic acid for America's leather trade came from chestnut bark. The nuts were a staple crop for turkeys and bears. And chestnuts roasting on an open fire cemented many a childhood Christmas memory.

A hundred years ago, chestnuts made up a quarter of the trees in the hardwood forests of the eastern United States and nearly half of some stands in the Great Smoky Mountains. That, of course, was before the chestnut blight. Shortly after the turn of the century, the chestnut blight, a bark fungus, showed up in New York City, probably from imported Japanese chestnuts. The blight attacked trees by girdling them. Within 50 years, the once majestic American chestnut had all but vanished.

Today, although research on producing a blight-resistant chestnut tree is beginning to bear fruit, there are no plans to reintroduce the chestnut to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The loss of the American chestnut was probably the worst ecological disaster to beset the Smokies, at least within the past 350 years, but the Park has successfully recovered, and there is no need to disrupt it again by trying to reconfigure the current forest.

The chestnut story has provided an object lesson for Park personnel, however, as other kinds of trees in the Park face an uncertain future. The Fraser fir is the most dramatic of several examples.

For nearly 50 years, the Park's Fraser firs have been under siege. The assailant is a tiny, wingless insect, the balsam woolly adelgid. The adelgid attacks the cambium-the layer of proliferating cells between the bark and the wood-cutting off the passage of water and causing the tree to die of dehydration. If the tree were an animal, we would say it died of thirst.

The adelgid, a European native, first appeared in Maine around 1908. It arrived in the Great Smokies in the late 1950s, probably on nursery stock from New England. During the next 30 years, winds carried the insect throughout the Park, draping a shroud over the high-elevation fir forests.

Today, these stands look like cordons of close-ranked flagpoles, with tattered colors at half-mast. Few of the young green firs in the understory are likely to rise to the canopy. No sooner do the trunks of these trees put on a few inches than their bark cracks, just enough to allow the adelgid to penetrate the cambium. Half a dozen years hence, most of these young trees die, which leaves many scientists fearful that the fir will succumb like the chestnut.

No one knows what will replace the fir. Whenever an American chestnut died, we could count on a black oak or red maple or tulip poplar or any of a score of other kinds of trees to take its place. The only likely candidate to replace the fir is the red spruce, but the red spruce is not doing well in the Park either, apparently the victim of air pollution, disease, and high winds.

As it did with the chestnut blight, the Park is allowing the adelgid to run its course. The only effective treatment is to spray trees with insecticide, but wholesale spraying throughout the fir forests would be devastating to other denizens of the Park. Still, selected trees along the road from Balsam Mountain Campground to Black Camp Gap are being individually sprayed with an insecticidal soap to kill the adelgid, and a plantation of 600 young fir grown from seeds collected at a variety of locations has been established for genotype preservation.

The Park is also monitoring remnant fir stands-some as much as a hectare in size-that have not yet succumbed to the adelgid, since some of these trees just might have a natural resistance to the insect.

Recovering Balds
The Park is having better success with some of its other high-elevation plant communities. The Appalachian avens, for instance-a small, showy, yellow-flowered member of the rose family, found only at high elevations in less than a dozen sites in the southern mountains, and nowhere else on Earth-is holding its own in a preserve in the Great Smokies, with a little help from Park Service friends. The population, which grows in precipitous rocky outcrops at Cliff Top on Mt. LeConte, was down to a hundred plants when the Park came to its rescue.

Rock climbers and other adventurers scrambling over the cliffs where the plants struggled to survive trampled the avens and destroyed its home on narrow rock ledges. The Park's first strategy, therefore, was to block off casual trails to keep rock hoppers out of the avens' fragile habitat. Seeds were then collected from the Cliff Top population, sprouted in a greenhouse, and returned to the Cliff Top site. Drought the first couple of years knocked out three-quarters of the seedlings, but those that survived are now thriving.

The Appalachian avens' home on Cliff Top is a heath bald-a shrub community largely made up of rhododendron, highbush blueberry, and other members of the heath family. Heath balds grow on sharp rocky peaks and knife-shaped ridges in the Park.

Another kind of bald in the Park, the grassy bald, is found at high elevations on rounded knobs and gently sloping ridgelines. Grassy balds are fields of mountain oat grass, with scattered shrubs, such as rhododendrons, azaleas, and blackberries.

No one knows for sure how grassy balds originated, but they were kept open by the Cherokee, who burned them for generations, and by herdsmen, who grazed cattle on them during the 19th and early 20th centuries. After the National Park Service acquired the land for Great Smoky Mountains National Park, burning and grazing stopped, and shrubs and trees began to take over the grassy balds.

In 1986, the Park began restoring two of its most popular grassy balds, Gregory and Andrews, which had shrunk considerably since the Park acquired the land. The two balds were selected because they'd been around a long time-in fact, they were described by the earliest European explorers who passed this way-unlike Spence Field, for example, which was primarily formed by pioneers' grazing livestock. And both Gregory and Andrews balds represent unique plant communities. Gregory has a variety of native grasses and wildflowers as well as its famous azaleas, which are hybrids of four species. Andrews has a spectacular display of catawba rhododendron and a high-elevation bog with carnivorous sundew plants.

The Park's initial task was to cut back invading shrubs, doubling the size of Andrews to about three and a half hectares and Gregory to about six hectares. Today, invaders are kept in check with mowers and weed trimmers. Azaleas have responded especially well, as has the dwarf gray willow, a rare shrub of the Southern Appalachians.

Wildness Is Preservation
Some areas of the Park, like Cades Cove, are considered cultural areas and can tolerate a great deal of human construction. Most of the Park, however, is classed as wilderness. Trails are the only signs of human habitation allowed in such wilderness areas.

Just because an area is classed as wilderness, however, doesn't mean a totally hands-off approach to land managment. While Park managers are much more circumscribed in wilderness zones than in cultural areas, they can still remove exotic species and conduct controlled burns; and if they want to restore a wilderness ecosystem, such as Gregory or Andrews Bald, they can cut, mow, or burn to maintain the ecosystem in its restored state.

Their ultimate goal is to preserve the wilderness in a relatively unspoiled condition-something like it looked when Europeans first arrived on the scene. They want to be sure the beauty we see and enjoy today will still be around for the benefit of our children and for unborn generations.

For more information, contact Bob Miller, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 107 Park Headquarters Road, Gatlinburg, TN 37738, or call 865-436-1207.