04/21/2010

Wildlife Scientist To Help Stage Comeback for Canebrakes

AUBURN, Ala.—As he journeyed through the Southeast in the late 1700s, American naturalist and botanist William Bartram was awed by the vast stands of river cane that dominated bottomlands throughout the region. The expansive canebrakes, he wrote, “rolled to the horizon like an ocean” and “exceeded anything I have ever seen.”

Today, though, Bartram would be hard pressed to find even a quarter-acre stand of river cane in the southeastern U.S. because in the 200-plus years since his visit, the native bamboo, scientifically known as Arundinaria gigantean, has ceded more than 95 percent of its original territory to farms, forests, pastures and development.

In fact, canebrakes, which serve not only as stream buffers and stream-bank stabilizers but as critical wildlife habitat as well, now are deemed highly endangered ecosystems. That has prompted a number of natural resource and conservation agencies and organizations throughout the Southeast to launch river cane restoration projects.

In a new study funded by the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, Auburn University wildlife scientist Mark Smith aims to increase the pace of those projects by stepping up seedling production and determining the most practical, effective and cost-efficient techniques for reestablishing river cane ecosystems.

For the first phase of the three-year study, Smith is using recently developed technology to produce cane seedlings via micropropagation, a technique in which thousands of new plants can be regenerated from a single mother plant.

“We want to move river cane to the mass-production level,” said Smith, who credits Mississippi State University researchers with “working the bugs out of” the micropropagation process.

Currently, Smith is digging up river cane plants in Alabama and sending the rootstock to Roundstone Native Seed, a Kentucky-based native plant producer that is collaborating with him on the project. There, workers are splicing off small sections of the rhizomes—horizontal, underground stems that spread plants by sending out shoots and roots from their nodes—they will use to produce 25,000 river cane seedlings over the course of a year. Smith will be collecting detailed data throughout the propagation process to determine how well cane tissue cultures survive, grow and develop.

Then the research will move from the laboratory to the field as Smith plants the sprigs in three five-acre test plots in north Alabama and conduct multiple trials to identify successful production practices and determine the true costs of production.

“There’s a lot we don’t know about establishing river cane—how to prepare the planting sites, how closely to plant the seedlings, how to control competition from other native as well as invasive plant species and how to manage and maintain these unique plant communities,” he said.

As an assistant professor of wildlife sciences at Auburn, Smith is especially intent on restoring stands of river cane because they provide habitat for more than 50 species of wildlife and several bird species of great conservation concern. But in addition to the important habitat, water-quality and soil-conservation benefits they provide, canebrakes have cultural significance.

“River cane is a part of the cultural fabric of many local native American tribes in the Southeast,” he said. Native bamboo was a major resource for Cherokee and other bands in the region, who used river cane to make goods ranging from baskets to boats.

Smith stressed that river cane, the plant, is not an endangered species.

“It can, in fact, be found in small patches here and there throughout Alabama and the Southeast,” he said. “It is the large ‘thickets,’ tens to hundreds of acres in size or larger, that we're missing on the Southeastern landscape.”

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Contact: Jamie Creamer, jcreamer@auburn.edu, 334-844-2783

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