Logging threatens a scientific research area in Franklin State Forest

Logging could threaten a scientific research site in one of Tennessee’s oldest forests. 

The Tennessee Department of Agriculture is developing a plan to sell timber from the Franklin State Forest on the Cumberland Plateau, a hilly area with thin soil, active fungal networks and centuries-old trees near Sewanee. 

This state forest also contains a nearly 90-acre research site with a long legacy of data — a site the department suggested could be subject to chopping. 

“A harvesting schedule will be determined for areas where harvesting is appropriate to support forest health and sustainability,” said Kim Doddridge, a department spokesperson. 

Earlier this summer, the department denied a request from Tennessee State University to formally protect the site for future research and education.

Some experts are now calling on the department to reconsider.

“This agency does not value science,” said Davis Mounger, co-director of the conservation group Tennessee Heartwood, which has tracked clearcutting in state forests in recent years. 

The site is rare for multiple reasons, Mounger said, and ongoing research on its trees could unlock a new understanding of how best to protect Tennessee’s forests. 

Old data in an old forest 

In the 1970s, the Tennessee Valley Authority set up plots in the Franklin State Forest to study its ecology, as part of research into acid rain from coal burning. The utility mapped all trees across a few acres through a practice known as “spatially explicit modeling,” which was uncommon in forest ecology at the time. 

Two decades later, TVA handed the data to researchers at the University of the South in Sewanee. 

“The longer the data has been collected over time, the more valuable it becomes. Because things like forests, they change very slowly,” said Jon Evans, a biology professor at the university who has worked at the site ever since TVA passed it on. “The lives of trees play out over literally centuries.” 

Evans continued the data collection, recording the same level of detail in each of the past three decades. He and colleagues from other universities have investigated organism diversity, how the forest stores carbon, and the underlying networks of fungi, while also instructing students and future ecologists. 

The research site is on a raised area in the Cumberland Plateau with thin soil that was never cleared for agriculture — a true old-growth forest that acts as a control site for research, according to Evans. 

“That’s what makes the site so valuable,” Evans said. “We need places that are the canary in the coal mine…the finger on the pulse of this planet.”

The shallow, sandy soil is also what makes the site so vulnerable. 

“If you roll heavy equipment across that very thin rug, you’re ripping it apart,” Evans said. 

Tennessee selling timber from state forests

The Tennessee Department of Agriculture operates the Tennessee Division of Forestry, which oversees the state’s 15 state forests. Collectively, the forests represent about 161,000 acres. 

The division sells rights to log these forests every year and returns that revenue to the agriculture department or division. Based on the past two fiscal years, the state is allowing logging at a rate of nearly 5% of all state forest land per decade. 

Logging is a big industry in Tennessee. It represents the fourth-largest export, by monetary value. 

The state’s logging represents a tiny portion of that. Evans suggested that the department should stop selling timber and instead focus on supporting and using the science that informs sustainable forest management. 

Courtesy Davis Mounger

A timber sale for land in Prentice Cooper State Forest in October 2018 resulted in a clearcut.

Tennessee environmental groups have documented that some of these state timber sales translate to clearcutting, a form of tree removal that damages the ecosystem and disrupts what types of trees and plants can return to an area. 

For example, heavily logging or clearcutting forest areas dominated by oak trees seems to remove the fungal network and seed bank for that system, allowing poplar trees to take over. 

The Division of Forestry maintains that timber sales and the resulting logging do not harm forests. When pressed on how the division determines forest health, spokesperson Kim Doddridge repeated that “harvesting supports forest health and sustainability.”

She said the division does not have any memorandums with universities, and the proposed memorandum with Tennessee State University “did not include mutual benefits to all parties.”