Located just outside Asheville, NC, the largest city in that part of the State, Bent Creek was well positioned to serve as a meeting and demonstration site for researchers, foresters, and many others. In 1925, the Forest Service established the area that officially became the Bent Creek Experimental Forest. This was 4 years after the Agency established the Appalachian Forest Experiment Station (AFES), the facility that would manage Bent Creek and other experimental forests in the Southeast, in Asheville.

Bent Creek was, in some ways, a product of the new conservation and forest science movement that emerged in western North Carolina in the midto- late 19th century. This conservation movement, in large part, was a response to the unsustainable timber harvesting practices, overgrazing, and other poor land management practices of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that left large portions of Southern Appalachia and elsewhere in desperate need of rehabilitation and regeneration. In the late 1800s, Carl Schenck and others started the Nation’s first forestry school on land near Bent Creek that was owned by George Vanderbilt, who had a great interest in science—specifically horticulture and silviculture.

The Forest Service established Bent Creek to conduct research on forest regeneration, erosion control, and to demonstrate forest management practices. In 1925, with financial assistance from the Federal Bureau of Entomology, the Agency set aside 150 acres on the Pisgah National Forest, which consisted of land purchased by the Forest Service from Vanderbilt’s estate, for the new research facility. In 1927, the Forest Service expanded the experimental forest from 150 to 1,100 acres. In 1935, the Agency shifted another 5,200 acres of the Pisgah to Bent Creek, bringing the acreage to about 6,300. In the 1940s and 1960s, portions of the experimental forest were removed for recreational use and for a major road project, bringing the total to about 5,500 acres today.

Construction continued into the early 1930s as the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal work relief program for young men from unemployed families, built the 4-mile Hardtimes Road that still winds through the experimental forest. At the same time, other New Deal workers constructed 13 buildings including 4 laboratories, a bunkhouse, 2 garages, a ranger’s house, and an insectory. These now rustic buildings were built with handhewn chestnut beams and white oak shingles. Nearly all of Bent Creek’s original buildings still stand today.

Early Research

Earl H. Frothingham, the first director of AFES, played an important role in establishing Bent Creek and guided its research early on.

“Frothingham’s goal was to provide a place to begin a program of silvicultural research in the Southern Appalachians,” says David Loftis, research forester and former project leader at Bent Creek, “and to bring a fairly large area under management so we could observe problems and then demonstrate results. We’ve tried to fulfill those objectives over the years.”

Frothingham focused early research at Bent Creek on rehabilitating and regenerating degraded hardwood stands. Workers divided Bent Creek into dozens of research “compartments” with boundary markers and plans for managing and studying each. Scientists tested several types of management practices and maintained records of the costs and returns by compartment. Besides forest management and timber production, research began on erosion control, insects (southern pine beetle), diseases such as chestnut blight, and a regional fire warning system.

Highly degraded stands were the focus of Forest Service researcher Jesse Buell, who in 1930 performed one of the first clearcuts in the Southern Appalachians solely for research purposes. Buell designed the study to better understand the regeneration of “high-graded” sites where the larger, commercially valuable trees were removed first. The 6-acre site, known as the Buell Plot, is the oldest area at Bent Creek for which detailed data on hardwood regeneration and stand development are available.

Like scientists at other Forest Service stations across the country, Bent Creek researchers sought methods for preventing and eliminating forest fires. Bent Creek scientists developed a fire danger measurement rating system that, by the late 1940s, was used at 420 stations in 24 Eastern and Southern States. Bent Creek also received recognition for developing a fire visibility meter that has been used nationwide.

Protecting waterways was also an early concern at Bent Creek. In 1948, forester-in-charge James F. Renshaw wrote about the Nation’s first extensive experiments in lowcost roadbank stabilization conducted at the experimental forest. “The findings were widely adopted for use on cut and fill banks by highway and railway engineers throughout the South,” wrote Renshaw. Bent Creek researchers shared the results of these and other management studies with foresters, scientists, and private landowners through what today is referred to as technology transfer.

As the country mobilized for World War II, research slowed at Bent Creek and staffers conducted field studies on a custodial basis.

While Bent Creek researchers of the mid-20th century clearly recognized all the benefits that forests offered, timber management practices were a primary concern at the experimental forest after the war. Research sites of 100 acres or more were developed to study hardwood stand management. Researchers compared clearcuts to selection cuts, analyzed short versus long rotations, and studied levels of growing stock and farm woodland management.

The ‘60s Bring a Change in Perspective

Around 1960, under the leadership of Charles McGee and later Don Beck, research at Bent Creek expanded to build a more ecological approach to forest systems. Rising concerns about the environment in general meant that social acceptance of timber management methods, whether even-aged, two-aged, or uneven-aged (group selection), would become more important. Research on growth and yield included effects of thinning on understory plants and wildlife food sources.

Loftis cites a study by Bent Creek researcher Lino Della-Bianco that centered on precommercial thinning as a way to produce herbaceous browse for animals by allowing more light to reach the ground. “In the 1960s, a dual focus on timber production and forest composition and structure for wildlife emerged,” says Loftis. “Della-Bianco also studied production of wild grape, another important wildlife food.”

While Bent Creek scientists studied some artificial regeneration, research on natural regeneration methods dominated the program. Research on smaller plots replaced tests on large-scale sites because larger areas did not provide the detail required to understand site-specific ecology. Regenerating red oak on high-quality sites, growth and yield of yellowpoplar stands, and other long-term studies began.

By the 1960s, it was clear to researchers that yellow-poplar would almost always outgrow oak on good-quality sites. The challenges of regenerating oaks on good or excellent sites became the focus of most of the regeneration research at Bent Creek.

Mentors Beck and McGee introduced Loftis to the oak regeneration problem when Loftis joined Bent Creek as a graduate student in 1972 and, later, as a full-time employee in 1976. In the 1980s, Loftis studied the effectiveness of shelterwood cuts in regenerating oaks. He subsequently developed REGEN, a hardwood regeneration prediction model for the Southern Appalachians.

Early in the 1980s, Henry McNab, a research forester from the Hitchiti Experimental Forest in Georgia, joined Bent Creek. Site classification has been the heart of McNab’s research since then. “A forested area isn’t just the species of trees or other vegetation, but also the factors that influence what grows there—the soil, amount of sunlight, moisture, temperature. It’s site classification but with an ecological twist,” says McNab.

The 1990s and Beyond

The historical significance of Bent Creek was officially recognized in April 1993 when its facilities were listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Three years earlier, Loftis assumed the role of project leader of the SRS research unit housed on the experimental forest, establishing ecosystem management as the foundation for silvicultural research on upland hardwoods. At Bent Creek, scientists resurrected artificial regeneration research, particularly with respect to its role in restoration of oak and chestnut communities. They studied the effects of prescribed fire, exotic plants, and diseases on upland hardwood ecosystems.

Research ecologist Katie Greenberg joined the staff in 1995, bringing her expertise in wildlife research to Bent Creek. She has analyzed the effects of natural disturbances such as Hurricane Opal, prescribed fire, two-aged harvests, and other silvicultural treatments on wildlife populations. Greenberg, who became project leader for the Bent Creek unit in 2007, also studies the production of mast and fleshy fruit as food sources for wildlife. Today, a “realigned” SRS Upland Hardwood Ecology and Management Research unit that includes Bent Creek and subteams in Arkansas, South Carolina, and Tennessee, has positioned itself to expand Bent Creek research on upland hardwood ecosystems to the regional level.

“Our unit is working with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, the Stevenson Land Company, and other partners to start a new regional study of oak ecosystem sustainability that is an extension and expansion of Loftis’ work,” says Greenberg. The study examines the impact of three silvicultural treatments on hardwood (primarily oak) regeneration, plant diversity, wildlife habitat quality, and wildlife populations on three sites chosen as representative of the upland hardwood ecosystems that stretch from Virginia through Arkansas. Tara Keyser, Callie Schweitzer, Stacy Clark, Marty Spetich, Kay Franzreb, Susan Loeb, and Dan Dey (Northern Research Station) are among those involved in the regional project.

As part of another project, Clark is leading a team of researchers who are trying to determine the best approach to restoring American chestnut in eastern hardwood forests. Clark is using experimental material from The American Chestnut Foundation to examine seedling response to a variety of forest conditions, including clearcuts, shelterwood harvests, and thinnings. This spring, the team established the first experimental plantings of blight-resistant trees in national forest locations in the Southern Region to determine how well the seedlings will compete in real-world forest conditions.

Bent Creek’s Contributions

Research from Bent Creek has contributed to the health and sustainability of Southern Appalachian forests. It’s clear that one of Bent Creek’s biggest contributions has been in the area of regeneration and management of Southern Appalachian hardwoods. Additionally, Bent Creek researchers have led the way in ecological classification and in research on hard and soft mast production for wildlife managers. However, it’s possible that Bent Creek’s most significant legacy could be its long-term datasets, established largely to document growth and yield and regeneration. These volumes of information, used by scientists of yesterday and today, could be key in understanding climate change and other environmental crises facing the United States in the future.

Collaborators:

University of Georgia, Duke University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, University of Tennessee, Clemson University, North Carolina State University, University of Kentucky, University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill and Asheville campuses), The American Chestnut Foundation, Southeastern State forest and wildlife agencies, and a vast network of forestry consultants and industrial foresters

 

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