• Paint Rock scientist tours – March 19, 2018

Follow the first big steps in the development of The Paint Rock Forest Research Center:

Two of the great minds of the Smithsonian’s international ForestGEO program, Stephen Hubbell (distinguished professor of evolutionary biology at UCLA) and Richard Condit (with the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago), bring their expertise to the Paint Rock forest this week.
And what an incredible field day Monday, as we deftly dodged the thunderstorms and tornadoes that swept through the area. The wildflowers in Paint Rock right now are amazing. It’s no exaggeration to say that there are miles of trout lilies covering the hills of Sharp Bingham preserve right now, with multiple species of trilliums blooming like weeds among Dutchman’s breeches, windflowers, Celandine poppies, jeffersonia, phacelia, weird long-spurred violets, doll’s eyes, foamflower (and what in the world were all those wildflowers we didn’t have time to stop and identify?).
But we weren’t there to catalog the wildflowers. Instead, we were all amazed once again to see the incredible diversity of trees and shrubs on this site, and the strange ways they are distributed on the high slopes of Paint Rock. We’d be walking through a few hundred feet of forest, surrounded by the persistent gold leaves of beech, and then, by some odd forest magic, we took another step and the beech leaves disappeared entirely, and an unusual forest of blue ash, magnolias, smoke trees or others appeared.
Steve, Rick, Luben Dimov and myself are amazed, perplexed and excited by the strange biological “zoning” of these Paint Rock forests. We believe that understanding the very patchy distribution of plants here can tell us a lot about the distribution of trees, shrubs and other plants throughout eastern North America — and may help us find a safe refuge for those species as climate changes again.