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As Western North Carolina began to return to normal after Hurricane Helene – electricity restored to most and water flowing to toilets - Asheville Field Office biologists Sue Cameron, Mark Endries, and Gary Peeples took time to visit some Allegheny County wetlands – to assess storm damage and to perform some overdue vegetation management. Their trip was a small part of a broader effort to assess storm impacts to key natural areas – from streams to mountaintop forests to important wetlands – an assessment that will take months or even years to fully play out.
The impacts of Hurricane Helene, though focused further south, were felt in Alleghany County, NC. However, in the wetlands visited by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists, the only signs of the storm were a downed tree, swaths of grass that had been pushed down by flowing floodwater, some deposited trash and debris, and flood wrack caught on remnant fence lines. Everything else looked…normal. These natural areas dotting a pastoral landscape behaved just like you would expect – giving floodwaters space to spread out and slow down, and in doing so, decreasing negative impacts downstream.
The vegetation management is a near annual ritual for biologists from the Asheville field office who have adopted management of a site near the Virginia border. The wetland is undeveloped and protected, however it’s the scene of a slow-but-ever-changing landscape as the resident plant community ebbs and flows with each passing year. The goal is to maintain a diversity of wetland plants that in-turn supports a diversity of animal life. This means keeping larger or more aggressive plants from dominating, and keeping a check on plants like red maples, that might use enough water to impact the wetland’s water supply and movement – essentially drying it up over time. Vegetation management was a simple, if tedious, affair – cutting encroaching woody vegetation, then applying a hyper-targeted dose of herbicide to keep the stump from sprouting.
