Hurricane/tropical storm Helene just tore up the Southern Appalachians. This is my home turf for nature explorations and identifications, so it’s painful to see the destruction it left in its wake. We have a lot of clean-up ahead of us but right now the focus is still on rescuing people who are stuck without food, water and no way to get anywhere. I got lucky - my house is fine (just had some water to mop up in the basement) and everything is working here.
I was wondering about the impact of this on iNaturalist observations from the area so I did this comparison between observations made this weekend (2024) vs. the same weekend last year (2023).
This is the area I usually ID in. Chattanooga and Knoxville are still bright spots on the map, but Helene has pretty much wiped out the Blue Ridge Parkway corridor from Asheville to Boone. Infrastructure is gone, roads and bridges destroyed, whole towns obliterated by floods (search for Chimney Rock and Lake Lure if you want to see pictures). Asheville is still only accessible by air, all major roads leading to the city are gone, no power, water or cell service. Boone (where I work) was hit hard as well. A lot of people in town still have no utilities either.
It will be a good long while before I can make it out to my favorite places again. I’m sure this event will leave a gap in the observation records for this area. The Southern Appalachians are a hotspot for biodiversity. I wonder how nature will bounce back from this.
So we had very severe flooding in Vermont the last two years. Overall, i think the Appalachian flooding was yet worse, but in some localized areas at least the Vermont flooding seemed to be of equal, geologic-level impact. I’ve been monitoring impact on wetlands from this flooding and have been very surprised by the result. In areas of human disturbance, like logging roads without good drainage, undersized culverts, areas downstream from sources of flood debris from human structures, areas of too much pavement, etc, the impacts could be severe. But in mostly natural watersheds? The impacts were mimimal even from so called 1000 year floods. If sediments don’t have invasive plant seeds in them, native plants thrived in new sediment deposits. Rivers that were formerly entrenched now have broad cobble shores that are better for aquatic life. It’s true that some loss of shading from trees may have impacts, but that’s mostly limited in scope and partly offset by all the new coarse woody debris in streams. In things like bogs, intact undisturbed sloping seepage forest, cedar swamps, etc, the effect of even massive floods seems to be neutral if not even mildly beneficial (i am not trying to minimize the awful human impacts, but simply note that we don’t have another thing to worry about in nature as well).
I’d be interested if that proves true for Helene impacts as well.
It kind of loops back to a recurring theme that people seem to miss. In terms of human impact, human caused climate change is definitely an ‘existential’ threat (i hate that buzz word, but it works here). but in terms of impacts to ecosystems, habitat loss and ecosystem collapse matter much, much more (and also amplify the negative impacts of climate change)
incidentally feel free to reach out if you’re dealing with these floods. My home wasn’t damaged in the recent floods so i am very lucky, but i’ve got all too much lived experience with how slow and frustrating and stinky flood cleanup and recovery is for a community. I’m so sad to see these horrible floods happening elsewhere as well. Like i can literally still smell in my mind the sludgy sewery flood debris piles that sat in Montpelier for a month or more :(
All of this damage is heartbreaking. @annkatrinrose, I’m glad that you’re okay, and you have both my sympathy and my empathy. I was in the April 3rd, 1974 Super Outbreak. You can still see the scars in parks and wilderness areas, if you know where to look.
Greenville learned a lesson from Floyd back in '99. What were once the worst-flooded neighborhoods are now open greenspaces. We get areal flooding with most large rainfall events, but property damage is minimal; the only disruption I have noticed is that the city closes the greenways when they are submerged. It is no coincidence that parks and greenways are the main areas that flood. After Matthew (today is the 8th anniversary!), there were some flooded sections in town, but life went on as usual in most sections.
The awful human impacts could be lessened if we were smarter about where and how we pursued development.
When I made this post nine days ago, I had barely begun to understand just how big of an impact this storm has had on our entire region and what that might mean for making observations going forward. I find it still hard to grasp. It pretty much demolished the infrastructure, including all interstate connections between NC and TN. It will take years to rebuild. It closed down the entire Blue Ridge Parkway and the southern third of the Appalachian Trail - hundreds of miles deemed unsafe to travel/hike. Lesser hit areas are starting to reopen but access to the Southern Appalachian mountains for recreational activities (such as making iNat observations) will be limited for a quite some time. While a lot of progress is made in restoring power and access, some areas will still be without electricity and cell phone/internet for weeks to come. I made a journal post with some more details so I don’t want to go into all that here.
To bring this back to the impact on nature, two things that have been on my mind:
I’ve seen a lot of yellow jackets out and about in the immediate aftermath. In fact, one of the first things I noticed when cleaning up my own basement was a wasp flying around inside, seemingly lost. I’m apparently not the only one to notice as local agencies quickly started asking for donations of benadryl, epipens etc. This article suggests the insects got flooded out of their homes as well, increasing the number of agitated wasps in the area. It also makes the prediction that there may be fewer colonies next year as overwintering young queens may have drowned. It makes me wonder about all the other insects that spend a good amount of their lives underground as larvae, pupae etc.Will we see an effect on insect diversity and populations over the next couple of years, and which ones are most likely to be affected?
The other question that has been going through my mind of course is when will we be able to access hiking trails to get to our favorite nature spots again? Do those even still exist? I know a lot of places that have had rare plants all but extirpated by trampling from too many people visiting in the wake of the pandemic and ignoring signage to please stay on the trails. If the trails have become inaccessible, will nature in these places get a chance to recover? Or will it just make it worse as people start blazing their own trails impatient to wait for repairs to be made?
On a side note, the groundhog under my shed has not only survived the flood just fine but is very happy with all the fallen apples, and the squirrels seem to have started an outright war over the bounty of walnuts that came down.
My last observation before the storm was an oak, including acorns, a short distance south of 74 in a gated community. My first observation after the storm was a pine, shortly followed by another pine and an oak, that had toppled and fallen on power lines. I couldn’t post them for almost two weeks because the power was out. I subsequently went back to the same gated community and found that the oak is still standing, but another oak fell on the traverse point.
Fires are not the same as hurricanes, but I had the same thoughts cross my mind after the fires in California burned some of my favorite places over the last five years (Lassen, Bidwell Park, Grover Hot Springs, Big Basin Redwoods, etc.). These places will never be exactly the same as I remeber from the first time I visited, and that is indeed a little sad.
The silver lining is the opportunity to see how they recover. Grover Hot Springs for example was nothing but matchstick trees after the Tamarack Fire. After a year or two, there are wildflowers in the spring covering the understory where they wouldn’t have grown before, and the manzanitas and elderberries are the first woody plants to start growing back, and new pines have already sprouted. It’s off to a good start. Your places, too, will recover, but will take time for them to be anything like what they were before. In the meantime, watch for those signs of regrowth. Observe the process of a new forest growing in place of the old, and take comfort that your favorite places ARE still there, and that like any living thing, they change and grow.
Oh yes, we will. I just hope it’s not going to be all invasives taking advantage and moving into those disturbed areas. I had a student working on a monitoring project of the invasive mile-a-minute weed along the New River this summer and fall. He went out to his main study site and the plants had all washed away in the flood. These are annuals and they were fruiting, adapted to spreading by having their fruits carried downstream with the water. We predict the flooding further facilitated the spread of this particular invasive in our area.
We were also looking for the predatory weevil that had been released in that area and was doing well before the storm, but still very limited to one locality. They overwinter in the soil underneath the plants. I can’t help but wonder if any of those have survived or if the entire population was knocked out by the storm. It would be an interesting project to carry over into next year to try to find new locations where the plant comes up and see how far from the actual stream it went, and try to find any surviving weevils to see how they fared.
Infrastructure is gone, roads and bridges destroyed, whole towns obliterated by floods (search for Chimney Rock and Lake Lure if you want to see pictures). Asheville is still only accessible by air, all major roads leading to the city are gone, no power, water or cell service. Boone (where I work) was hit hard as well. A lot of people in town still have no utilities either.
