Team works to protect ice-age era Roan Mountain ecosystem

If you’re hiking the Appalachian Trail on Roan Mountain near Carver’s Gap, you might encounter thickets of tourists that came down from the north and decided to settle in North Carolina. But these are not the kind of tourists that some Ashevilleans find pesky. 

These newcomers came south so far back — during the ice age some 2.5 million to 12,000 years ago — they have bragging rights over any proud natives, whether indigenous or European.

Green alders are typically a plant of the far north, says Irene Rossell, professor of environmental science at UNC Asheville, “but as the glaciers came south, northern plants moved down ahead of them. As the climate got colder, they were able to take hold.”

Rossell and Giacomo Borso, a senior environmental science major, have been studying since May green alder balds — treeless areas on the mountain ridge — in partnership with the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy (SAHC). The conservancy has managed the alder balds and their adjacent cousins, the grassy balds, for almost four decades for the U.S. Forest Service.

Rossell and Borso explained their project in late July while sitting in a science lab in UNCA’s Robinson Hall.

Standing guard

Despite their long lineage, green alders are starting to get pushed out, and that’s the reason for the study, Rossell says. “It’s a rare ecosystem and it’s declining due to woody encroachment. It’s important to understand how these ecosystems work to try to preserve them,” she says.

Marquette Crockett, Roan stewardship director for the SAHC, agrees. “Green alder is very rare in our [area] and is only found in the Roan Highlands,” she says. The highlands are a cluster of mountains and ridges that straddle the border of North Carolina and Tennessee, according to the SAHC website.

The grassy balds, right at the mountaintop, are well known. “You have beautiful views in many directions because there are no trees,” Rossell says. “It opens up a scenic vista.”

But green alder balds often go unnoticed by Appalachian Trail hikers. “A lot of people just walk right past them,” Rossell says. “They are old but they’re not supershowy, like a lot of the other plants up there, like rhododendrons.”

And they are becoming rarer. Green alder balds are threatened by encroaching shrubs like blackberry and blueberry. “The blackberry brambles are native,” Rossell says, “but they are aggressive in their growth, and sometimes they can shade out other plants.” When Borso and his assistant, Justin Tapia, another environmental science student, are walking around in the alder bald, Rossell notes, “you can barely see them.” Borso adds, “Some of the blackberry stems would be higher than my height, and I’m 6 foot.”

In 2015, the SAHC surveyed the green alder balds, the grassy balds, and other rare ecosystems. “We wanted to ensure that they were accurately represented in the Pisgah National Forest Plan, which was just getting started at that time,” says Crockett. The survey was “a snapshot in time to see how the green alder community was faring,” she notes.

In this case, “snapshot” was both literal and figurative. The SAHC divided the roughly 15-acre area into 120 plots and identified each by GPS. They took photographs of each one and then began the meticulous process of documenting how many of each species were in them. 

Now, almost a decade later, Rossell and Borso are finding out just how that green alder community has fared.

Plot by plot

Borso explains how the process works: “When I go up there for fieldwork,” he says, “I have a GPS that brings me directly to each plot. Once I’m there, I look at the photo taken in 2015 to make sure that I’m in the right area.”

He then plants a stake flag in the center of the circular plot, which has a 5-meter radius and divides the circle into quadrants. “We do a rough visual estimate of area coverage of woody plants in each quadrant and identify which species they are.”

Borso pays particular attention to woody plants like blackberry and blueberry, as some plots have nearly 100% blackberry cover. But for the green alders, he says, “we’re counting their stems as well as estimating cover. That will help other researchers determine whether green alders are in decline or holding steady in the future.”

The next step will be to look at how the 2024 cover estimates compare with what the SAHC found in 2015. “They gave us a mountain of data to compare to,” he says. “Once I have the fieldwork completed, I’ll analyze the data, write a final paper, and then present my findings to the university.” 

That presentation will come in November at UNCA’s Undergraduate Research Symposium, to which the public is invited. 

“Maybe after that,” Borso says, “I’ll work on getting the paper peer-reviewed for publication in a scientific journal.” 

The routine of fieldwork

The fieldwork for the project began in May and should be finished by the end of August.

While it takes only about 20-30 minutes to sample one plot, Rossell quickly adds, “You have to realize that first (Borso) has to drive to Roan Mountain, a 1 1/2-hour trip, and then he has to hike 2 1/2 to the study site.” 

Locating the plots using a global positioning system takes time. “Finding the next plot can take a while,” Rossell says, “and when he’s done, he has to hike 2 1/2 miles back to the car and then drive home. So we’re looking at eight to 12 plots done in one full day.”

And that’s if the weather cooperates. “Like this week, it’s going to rain and thunderstorm at Roan every day,” Rossell says. ”It’s a very high elevation, all exposed. You don’t want to be up there during a thunderstorm.” 

And good weather is its own challenge. Borso says he definitely wears long pants and a long-sleeved shirt. “And I try to wear something that covers my face because I’ve gotten sunburned a few times. You’re really at the brunt of the sun.”

Nevertheless, Borso says, “I love being outside and studying plants.” Although he had been an outdoors person growing up, “I didn’t really know that I wanted to study plants until a few years ago when I came to Asheville.” He credits Rossell with taking him in that direction.

And if the plants are deemed threatened, there are ways to protect them.

“Initial steps might be to cut back competing vegetation, allowing the alder the space it needs to flourish,” says Crockett of the SAHC. The group already does that to keep the grassy balds open on the Roan so it would just mean adding in some other areas.

“However, green alder, like many of our high-elevation species, is also severely threatened by climate change, so monitoring the long-term health and viability of the species may feed into future management ideas that we are only beginning to ponder.”

So, the next time you’re on Roan Mountain, look out for those green alders. They might need more of our attention.