Newsletter #2: Spring at PER I

Spring has arrived at Pocosin Ecological Reserve I and so has construction!

Construction kicks off at PER I

Next week, our COO Beth Richtman is speaking at Carbon Unbound East in New York — reach out if you want to meet.

Peat is having a moment: high-impact, and apparently high-fashion too, per this New York Times piece.

In this issue, Vlad Roosevelt takes us to PER I for the construction kickoff — bird surveys with Steve Apfelbaum, a 6-foot soil core with Dr. Curt Richardson, and what 8,000-year-old peat tells us about what comes next.

With gratitude,
The Pantheon Team

Restoring 8,000 Years of Land Memory at PER I

By Vlad Roosevelt, Director of Operations

Spring has arrived at Pocosin Ecological Reserve I: grasses growing in every shade, magnolia trees breaking into white bloom, birds migrating north after the winter, and black bears roaming in one of their densest populations in North America. All of it unfolding alongside the grind of heavy equipment — forklifts setting risers and culverts into place, dump trucks hauling sand and rock across 50 miles of road where new water control infrastructure is rising from the ground. Spring and restoration arrived together; the peatlands are about to be reborn.

This week I oversaw the kickoff of construction that will rewet and restore the peatlands, joined Steve Apfelbaum, Pantheon’s Chief Restoration Ecologist, on the final bird survey and aquatic sampling that will complete biodiversity baselining at PER I, and got a firsthand tour of our newly constructed eddy covariance flux tower sites from Dr. Curt Richardson, Pantheon’s Chief Scientific Officer.

To spend a morning in the field with Steve Appfelbaum is to spend a morning with a master naturalist in his element, doing what he loves most: identifying birds and plants. Routinely Steve will grab an unremarkable plant and say, “You gotta try this, it’s edible!” He lets you be the judge of whether it tastes good or not (spoiler: it typically doesn’t!).

During bird surveys, he closes his eyes, listens, and rapid fire begins to rattle off bird names as he hears them, non-stop for 10-12 minutes at each collection point. Afterward, he details which birds are residents, which are migrating, where they came from and their destinations, bird calls that were territorial, mating calls, etc. To be a naturalist is to translate the natural world using all your senses and interpret what the land is telling you. In a way Steve becomes the voice of the land itself.

Between bird survey points Steve and I discussed the ecological role of fire and how decades of fire suppression policies have led to widespread degradation of native species and heightened catastrophic fire risk for large areas of the country. Indeed, this is the case at PER I, where catastrophic wildfire is the single greatest risk in our dewatered pocosins and peatland systems globally. “Essentially, fire can unlock the land’s innate ability to heal itself,” Steve tells me. “Ground fires recharge the soils by making nutrients readily available in microbes and plants. They are a means of controlling the spread of invasive species, limiting pests like ticks, and stimulating the growth of native seed banks lying dormant in the ground. The land has memory eons longer than ours, and the land always remembers what it was. It is our task to help it find its way home.”

For people who are familiar with Aldo Leopold and his work, A Sand County Almanac, you’ll have noticed Steve’s Leopoldian ethos. He approaches the natural world with an infectious blend of energy, childlike wonder, deep respect, and systems-level thinking. This means when Pantheon looks at potential restoration parcels, we look at how they fit into the watershed, how the watershed was formed and changed over the past 12,000 years until today and zoom in from there, all the way to the edible plants and the microbes that feed them. This is the minimum ecological restoration required to restore complex living systems.

PER I is about 14,500 acres in size containing over 50 miles of roads and many more miles of ditches. There are a few sections of ditches however, where beavers, nature’s tireless engineers, have made their dams and stopped the water. In these sections, the water is 4-5ft deep still, after 8 months of drought. As I approach one of these stretches to look at a water control site, a group of wood ducks take flight in the direction of the nearby wildlife refuge. The water surface is covered with lily pads about to bud their yellow and white flowers. The regular calls of prairie warblers and calls of cat birds jockeying for territory in the nearby trees are temporarily drowned out by intermittent calls of frogs from their hidden locations in the watery ditch. I think to myself, “This is the land trying to heal itself. It is a candle in the dusty darkness lighting on the next step of the path. A whisper of the land saying, “I’m not dead yet!” I often imagine what the site will look like post-restoration. Thanks to the beavers, I’m able to get a glimpse of what it might be once restored.

Between construction crew check ins, I get to spend several hours with Dr. Richardson while he explains pocosin ecology and nuances of pocosin wetland systems. Like Steve, he is a master of his field and the preeminent source for pocosin and wetlands ecology globally. Dr. Richardson is an eloquent orator from years of lecturing as a professor at Duke University. He also remembers finite details from a lifetime of scientific field work in remote places that enrich his storytelling. After listening to him for only a short time you come to realize that he has contributed disproportionately to the global knowledge base in the field of wetland ecology, particularly regarding the Everglades and pocosins (he has been cited 19,400 times, according to Google Scholar).

As Dr. Richardson extracts a 6ft soil core, he casually states the bottom layer of peat soil is 8,000 years old. He then seamlessly details the carbon flux in dewatered and restored pocosins, the ages and chemical composition of pocosin peat strata, soil temperatures, water table depths, and how to verifiably monitor the ecosystems using eddy covariance flux towers. All this collective data provides clues to the overall health and functionality of the ecosystem. Dr. Richardson explains that annual carbon emissions from peatlands are 1.5-2 billion tons. Easily sufficient to negate all carbon credits generated from carbon projects. By restoring dewatered peatlands, we can remove the net total amount of carbon available in the global carbon budget because saturated peat sequesters carbon. The flux becomes a one-way street. The carbon emissions reverse and new peat accumulates, durably storing atmospheric carbon.

“Carbon, though important,” Dr. Richardson concludes, “is just one molecule interacting within a larger system. The real trick of an ecologist is to take disparate pieces of something, imagine its form, and create a coherent system.” Indeed, restoration at PER I isn’t just a carbon story. It is a story about land, water, biodiversity, and 8,000 years of land memory still held physically in the peat bog. Since the ditches were dug, we’ve been losing that memory and CO2 to the atmosphere. This week, however, we started a process of reversal and healing. Hydrological restoration brought by our water control structures will provide the saturated foundation for bringing the pocosin bog back to a functioning wetland ecosystem. Over time, the native vegetation will return as the land remembers what it was.