In the wake of Hurricane Helene, Clemson is helping the US Forest Service decide what recovery can look like
Just after sunrise, Adrianna Nelson M ’28 and Vassili Hartofilax ’23 shouldered their equipment and hiked down a closed forest road in North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest.
At selected sites, they stretched nets through dense woods where sunlight struggles to penetrate and across openings tangled with cut logs and branches where crews were working to reduce wildfire risk.
Then they waited.
Before long, the nearly invisible nets began to reveal the forest’s inhabitants. Black-and-white warbler. Ovenbird. Eastern Phoebe. Hooded warbler. Each provided a clue to how species are responding to a landscape reshaped by Hurricane Helene.
Nelson, a graduate student in wildlife and fisheries biology, and Hartofilax, a field technician, were contributing to a much larger effort. Across the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests, dozens of Clemson University teams are documenting how the storm altered forests, streams and the species that depend on them.
Helene brought days of rain to the Southern Appalachians, triggering floods, landslides and widespread tree blowdowns. Streams shifted course. Forests were flattened. Terrestrial and aquatic habitats changed almost overnight, raising urgent questions about species already at risk.
Near Canton, North Carolina, biologists waded into a stream pushed from its former channel, documenting the fish that remain. Outside Morganton, North Carolina, another crew paused its search for aquatic insects to record pH, water conductivity, light levels and canopy cover, measurements that can help explain why some species persist while others disappear.
Elsewhere, teams deployed acoustic recorders for birds and bats, assessed forest structure and searched for species of conservation concern. Viewed together, their observations can reveal which ecological communities remain intact, which are changing and which may need help.
That distinction matters to the Forest Service. Across a vast and varied landscape, managers must decide where hazardous fuel reduction is appropriate, trails should be rerouted, access restricted, vegetation replanted or invasive species controlled. Those choices require a clear understanding of what has survived, what is most vulnerable, and how a single action may affect the larger system. To help answer those questions, the Forest Service turned to Clemson.
The goal, said Christine Martens, the project’s terrestrial coordinator, is to give the Forest Service “the best information to move forward with decision-making.”
The project combines Clemson’s expertise in wildlife, fisheries, forestry, fire and aquatic ecology with the Forest Service’s knowledge of the land and responsibility for its future. Instead of studying one species or habitat in isolation, researchers are tracing how changes in forests and streams ripple across an interconnected landscape.
The story they are uncovering is not entirely one of loss.
“It’s not all doom and gloom,” Martens said. “A lot of the early successional habitat that’s been formed is really great for birds and insects and all sorts of wildlife.”
When trees fall, sunlight reaches the forest floor, allowing wildflowers, shrubs and other vegetation to emerge. The resulting habitat can support birds, insects and other wildlife that favor younger, more open canopies.
“There’s some resiliency that is built into these natural systems,” said Kyle Barrett, chair of Clemson’s Department of Forestry and Environmental Conservation and one of the project’s lead investigators. Large, public protected areas, he said, give forests and streams room to rebound without the added pressures of development.
But resilience has limits. Some sites may recover with little assistance. Others may be too severely damaged to rebound on their own. Clemson’s findings will help the Forest Service distinguish between the two and target its efforts where they can do the most good.
Much of that work begins with graduate students and field technicians hiking into remote sites and documenting what they find — one bird, bat, fish or insect at a time.
Back along the closed forest road, each bird Nelson and Hartofilax documented offers another clue to how the forest is responding in Helene’s wake, helping show where nature is already doing the work and where it may need a helping hand.
