Alabama Biodiversity

Hello, my name is Brian Keener, and I would like to welcome you to this program that will be documenting the biodiversity of Alabama.

I come to you today from the banks of the little Cahaba River in Bibb County.

We exceptionally excel in certain organisms, especially aquatic animals.

Today in this program, you're going to learn from several scholars throughout Alabama who've spent their careers researching and working with this biodiversity, working to help conserve it and study it and even describe and find more species.

So this program should be very interesting to you about learning more about the biodiversity in your state.

I hope you enjoy it.

So Alabama is a superstar for biodiversity at the global scale as well as the national scale.

Nationally, we rank number four for species diversity.

That's all plants and animals added up together, we rank number four, the only states that are ahead of us, or California, Texas and Arizona.

So if you look at just states that are east of the Mississippi River, we ranked number one among U.S. states.

So no other state in the east and that's about half of them has more species than Alabama.

We are clearly punching above our weight.

So all this biodiversity in the state is more than just declarations, things for us to look at out the car window.

This stuff is really important for our economy and keeping us alive with all of this nature that you see around me and the nature that you find around wherever you live.

You don't have clean air, you don't have clean water, you don't have fresh soils for growing crops.

Those are those processes are called ecosystem services.

And that's what nature provides for us for free.

As long as we give nature enough space and time and resources to do it.

So here's an example of how right behind me of how nature's cleaning up water for us.

This is Turkey Creek, which feeds into the Black Warrior River, which is the major source of water for Birmingham and cities all way down to the coast.

The headlands all around this creek are forested.

That means that when it rains, the rain percolates through the soils.

The soils help clean up that water and clean up any drifting water across the surface and clean that up of pollutants so that when it hits the creek, it's clean.

That means that downstream we have cleaner water than we would have otherwise.

Being able to pull clean water out of our rivers means that we have to pay less for cleaning up that water to make it potable so that we can drink it.

So that's a direct example of how the forest that you see around me here and the creek behind me are doing things to help keep our economy humming and keeping us healthy with clean and affordable freshwater.

What's in Alabama is important, not just to Alabama, it's important to the whole country.

And that's about fish.

It's about trees, it's about grasses, it's about turtles.

And one of the things that's happening right now is we recognize that as climate changes, which its doing more dramatically in the northern tier, the heat tolerant genetics, the disease tolerant species of Alabama, because they've been exposed to this for so long, these areas have been around for much longer.

These fish have been around for much longer than fish in much of North America.

They've been part of this system for millions and millions of years.

They've seen a lot of transitions and they've survived it all.

Their genetics are ready for it.

So one of the things we're beginning to study is how do we what role will those genetics in Alabama, what role will the genes in these fish, in these trees, in these grasses play in the survival of forests throughout eastern North America?

So we created, for example, the Paint Rock Forest Research Center to begin to study that here in the Paint Rock Valley, not just the rivers, but the caves, the trees, the grasses, the salamanders, the snakes, all of that.

What role does that play?

Not just in Alabama, but throughout eastern North America.

So when you look at all the biodiversity, Alabama has the one category where we really knock it out of the park is our aquatic diversity.

That's the species that live in our creeks, in our rivers.

Alabama has a tremendous range of those species because we've got so many different major watersheds from the Tennessee River up in the northern part of Alabama to the Mobile River Basin, which covers about two thirds of the state of Alabama, plus those coastal rivers.

We've got lots of different unique watersheds.

And in each of those watersheds there's a unique set of species of fishes and crayfishes and mussels and snails that live together that aren't found anywhere else.

And that is how Alabama really punches above its weight in terms of its aquatic biodiversity.

And that's what really, really puts us on the map in terms of global biodiversity.

Alabama has just incredible biodiversity from the ocean all the way up here to the Tennessee River Valley where we are.

And the aquatic biodiversity is unrivaled anywhere in the temperate world.

We've just got amazing numbers of fishes, crawdads, mussels, snails, aquatic insects, salamanders, freshwater turtles, and this all creates an amazing mosaic of species that all work together to help clean our water.

Humans need fresh water.

Without fresh water, we can't survive.

And every species does its part to help clean the water.

Every time we lose a species, that foundation gets a little weaker and a little weaker.

We have to pay more to clean our water to drink.

Now, maybe we can't go swimming or paddleboarding or kayaking in the water and maybe we can't eat the fish that we catch.

So every time we work together to maintain the amazing diversity we have here, we're actually helping ourselves with clean water.

So you help a fish, you help yourself.

So behind me is the Paint Rock River and you just look at it from the surface and you're like, Oh, that's a nice river with a little ripple here.

It's wonderful.

But what got me involved in fishes is there's this hidden biodiversity under the surface.

We can't see it.

You've got to get out there with a mask and snorkel to see it or a seine, a net, and catches to see what's going on.

So this is a green side darter.

It's too early in the year for them to get green on their sides.

Here, let me flip it around like here.

Can you see that better?

Do you notice the Ws or Us along the lower sides?

That's really a distinguishing characteristic of this species.

They also have those big fins on their pecs here that they sort of rest upon when they're on the bottom.

Yeah, that's a nice one.

And it'll be another couple of months before they start getting actual green on their side.

They could be called the W or U darter with those markings.

So that's yet another species of darter we find here in the Paint Rock.

And here we've got a banded sculpin and, and you can see he's got eyes on top of his head.

He's got a huge head with a big mouth.

And these guys are ambush predators.

You can see that he's got these bands of pigment across the back.

We call those saddles, and that helps them blend into the stream bottom by breaking up his body pattern.

And he'll sit there and just wait for a small aquatic insect or fish to come by.

And his mouth is so big when he opens it up, it causes negative pressure and sucks the water and anything close to him into his mouth.

So that's how these guys feed.

They're really a really important part of the aquatic ecosystem because we need we need predators as well as well, everyone's a predator.

Just about all our fishes eat something that's made of meat, whether it's aquatic insects or ants or other fishes.

The best part of my job is being able to work with a team of multi-disciplinary biologists, ecologists, geologists and geomorphologist.

We all have the same goal.

Our main goal is clean water for all Alabamians.

And part of that is looking at the ecology or the environment in which all of our aquatic species live and how to determine what habitats are most important and how to protect those habitats.

So that involves water quality surveys, funnel surveys, assessments of stream channel measurements and watershed health for different watersheds throughout Alabama.

So there's been a big push recently for more research when it comes to crayfish.

So we've learned more about these species in the last 20 years.

And we have, in fact, some of the survey efforts that we can that we refer to as historic surveys were done in the 1970s.

So that's a lot of our point of reference for some of our habitats and populations.

So we're looking at data that's fairly recent in terms of what this taxa group has been experiencing in the in the recent past.

So our survey efforts now are ramping up and that's why we now know that we have 100 different species in the state, possibly even more.

The more work we do, the more well determine what different kinds of habitats are are suitable for those different crayfish.

So this is the smooth nose crayfish you can see as nice, smooth nose.

Procambarus Hybis is the scientific name, but the structure of this particular crayfish, this is a secondary burrower.

So you can kind of tell that this little torpedo like shape assist in him being able to excavate and create his burrow a little more efficiently.

So their body shape definitely tells the story about their life history and how they persist in the world, which is pretty cool.

So this one, this particular species is native to the Cahaba drainage, which is where we are today, which is also home to 21 different species of crayfish.

And some of our drainages are more biodiverse than others.

The most biodiverse drainages, including the Cahaba, Tennessee River drainage is probably one of our more biodiverse ones for crayfish, simply because there are so many caves and different habitats in that neck of the woods that we may not have here in central Alabama.

And we want to continue survey efforts and research efforts for habitat protection so that we know more about the other species in the state so that we can offer suggestions and recommendation when it comes to management and how to make sure that their conservation is more protected in the future.

But we have the highest number of crayfishes on the planet, the highest number of freshwater mussels on the planet.

Our freshwater fish diversity, although it doesn't match tropical biomes in that in that total number of species, we have more species than any other temperate region on the planet.

For freshwater snails, it's also amongst the most diverse on the planet.

Snails and mussels both are like the vacuums of rivers.

So mussels feed by filtering out water.

And historically, you'll notice that the site next to me, the little lower little Cahaba you can see all the way down to the bottom.

But historically, when mussels were 200 to 300 per square yard in the bottom of these systems, you could see through them for 15 feet.

That was not uncommon.

The the gastro pods are also they they also work as vacuum as they clean up stuff off the venthos and then those animals were in turn ingested by fishes, by other aquatic mammals.

So they really were the drivers of these systems, both ecologically the way they functioned and from a predatory standpoint, because they used to be they used to be forage for so many different types of animals.

So we have approximately 188 species of freshwater mussels in the state historically.

However, 26 of them are already extinct and 73 of them are listed are proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act.

Yeah, that's quite a large number of species in one state.

So and that's primarily why my unit works with freshwater mollusks, mussels, van snails for snails.

We have around 202 freshwater snails in the state.

Approximately, and 36 of those are already extinct.

And we have 14 species that are on the list or are about to be listed.

So one of the things we're trying to do is actually promote by doing the recovery work on the ground.

What we're trying to do is actually get some of these species down listed or delisted in the long term.

So if if a species was widespread and found throughout a large watershed and is now left in like one or two places, you can't recover that species without moving it and starting a new population somewhere else.

So that's what our unit does.

We take animals from one or two places we bring them to the hatchery.

We actually physically culture them and we put them in a new spot in an attempt to start a new population that makes them that that would, if successful, makes them less prone to extinction or or imperil them.

And then they to maintain those occurrences.

That's what all the other partners like the Nature Conservancy, like the Cahaba River Society, like all these watershed groups, the Geological Survey of Alabama, with all the assessment work.

That's why, you know, it's much more difficult to maintain these watersheds than it is for us to do the the culture work.

Although that's a that's a decade long process in itself.

But if the if the habitat will hold the animals, we can get them established.

But sometimes the bar is getting that habitat in good enough shape for where it will sustain those species.

You know, in Alabama, it's it's not the fishing, it's the fish that make Alabama great.

It's not the timber that makes Alabama great.

It's the forest.

And that's why we're here in this incredible place in Paint Rock.

We decided we needed to develop a forest research center that understood these North American forests in ways that we've never understood them before.

So we developed a program working with UCLA, with Smithsonian, with Alabama A&M, and with E.O.

Wilson from Harvard to develop one of the world's largest forest dynamics plot, where we understand what happens to every tree in that plot over 50 years.

It's a great program that was started in the tropics.

We wanted to do this in a temperate forest, and we're doing it right now.

We have the most diverse in terms of trees, we have the most diverse forest dynamics plot in North America, maybe in the temperate world we have, we've it's an incredible field of study, and you wouldn't believe how much is involved in it.

But basically we surveyed 150 acres.

We separated it into oh, 65 foot by 65 foot grids.

And then we looked inside of each of those little squares to see to make sure we knew where each tree was.

Any tree bigger than a pencil, any shrub, bigger than a pencil.

We are now up to close to 50,000 stems.

We'll probably have 100,000 stems labeled by the time we're done.

And what does that mean?

It means even when you get into a miserable little thicket like this of sweet gums, which are quite common in Alabama, will be following every one of these trees.

We each one has a tag, each one has a number, each one is on a map, each one has been identified, and we'll follow it for 50 years.

It's a remarkable thing when you see that over 150 acres, which is, oh, I don't know, close to 50 football fields, if you can imagine, really an incredible scale at what we're what we're doing and the research that's coming out of it is really revealing a lot about how forests work and about how important the Alabama forest is just on this 150 acres.

We're going to have about 100 to 120 species of trees just on 150 acres.

Longleaf pine forests are the most diverse forested ecosystem we have in North America.

You can take a square meter of the ground out here it or in some of the better managed longleaf forests and have up to 100 species of plants.

You can take a few hundred acres of the best longleaf and have more species of plants than you have in tens of thousands of acres of prairie.

So in Kansas, it's a phenomenal ecosystem.

A lot of what I do involves surveys for threatened and endangered species and also some management.

And I work with the species that occurs here, the red cockaded woodpecker quite a bit.

It's a unique bird.

It's one of nine species of woodpecker native to Alabama, and it has declined tremendously in the last century or so with the decline of the longleaf pine forest, we are down to six populations of the red cockaded woodpecker in the state and here in the Conecuh is the southernmost one and one of the large ones theyre are up to 100 breeding pairs.

A little bit more than that actually now where back in, I think in the mid-nineties they were down to about 13.

So with the right kind of management, you can bring these woodpeckers back.

They require cavities that they make.

Normally in old pine trees, they they need living trees to excavate their cavities.

And the tree has to be big enough to have a red heart fungus in the in the in the heartwood.

But most of the trees around here aren't that big anymore because we've cut the old trees down.

So we're having to help the woodpeckers out a little bit by putting artificial cavities in there in their trees for them to use until such time as the trees get bigger and older to install the artificial cavities, we climb up the tree using ladders.

The Forest Service people do that.

I use a deer stand to climb a tree, but there's other ways of doing it.

And you're about 20, 22 feet up, which is two ladder heights and with a chainsaw, cut a hole in the tree and cut some verticals and horizontals and break out the wood.

And then you've got a rectangular hole that you could slide this pre manufactured chunk of cedarwood in there that's been drilled out for the woodpeckers to use.

What we were doing with this pole was inspecting the cavity to check on its condition because this is the time of year we start thinking about is it time to replace that old deteriorating cavity because they don't last but maybe seven or eight, nine, ten years.

And I just call it peeping.

I peep the cavity with this camera and it looked very nice on the inside.

And you can tell that it's an occupied cavity.

It's got feathers in it.

You can tell by the condition of the tree.

It's got a lot of sap on the outside.

Well, one thing the woodpeckers do to deter snakes from climbing is they excavate up and up and down the trunk.

They'll peck these little sap wells which ooze sap out.

So when you look at the cavity there, you see a lot of sap on the outside of the tree that we're also the forest service biologists here have put this metal at the base of the tree to also double, you know, safeguard against climbing snakes.

So snakes aren't really a problem.

It's the flying squirrels and other cavity competitors that cause most of the trouble.

The reason Alabama has so many species has to do with geology and climate.

Climate is really important because Alabama is a very warm state, as everybody knows.

That means that we have a long growing season.

So that's lots of time for plants to grow.

Lots of time for plants to grow means that that's lots of time for insects to be eating those plants and then animals to be eating those insects and so forth.

So the longer the growing season, the more productive our ecosystems are and the more species that they sustain.

So climates really important for the long growing season and a wet growing season.

So we got a combination of lots of sunlight and lots of rain.

If you look at the geology of this state, Alabama is an incredibly diverse state from the mountains that are up in the northern part of the state through the coastal plain, all the way to the coastal fringe of the Gulf of Mexico.

If you were to look at a map where each color on the map represents a different geologic region of Alabama, where there's different soils at the surface or different types of rock, you'll find that Alabama is its map is like a tapestry of color.

It looks like a ginormous watercolor painting.

That geology is really important for biodiversity because every time there's a change in the color, you get a different type of soil.

Different soils mean different types of plants, different plants mean different types of animals.

So in a place like this here at Turkey Creek in Jefferson County, Alabama, you can have a different type of soil in the valley bottom than the one that's up at the top of the ridge.

And as a consequence, you've got different types of plants at the bottom versus at the top of the ridge.

Now, magnify that across the state and you can begin to understand why Alabama has so many species in it.

Our wildlife is many and varied here in Alabama, we have an incredible aquatic diversity with fish leading the nation in fish, mussels, snails, crayfish.

But we also have some of the highest biodiversity on earth of our turtle species, like the gopher tortoise here and our turtles both live in upland habitats such as this gopher tortoise, as well as our aquatic environments and our rivers, streams, lakes and ponds as well as even our marine environments.

We have lots of sea turtles here in Alabama that use our our coasts, so our wildlife plays a very vital role and is deeply connected to the geology and the plants as well.

The gopher tortoise depends on two big components.

One are these deep sandy soils and that allows the gopher tortoises to be able to dig these amazing burrows that they live in.

These gopher tortoises can dig these burrows as much as ten feet down and 50 feet long, and those burrows support a lot of other animals and gopher tortoises are vegetarian and they consume all of these are basis plants around me.

This is what they eat, these glasses and all these wonderful forms.

And so again, the the geology drives this.

Those deep sandy soils produce the habitat that the gopher tortoise needs to survive.

And the gopher tortoise creates these burrows.

And those burrows create habitat for lots of other animals.

There have been over 350 different species of animals that have been documented to use gopher tortoise burrows.

So one of the ways that we can determine what lives in a gopher tortoise burrow is by using what's called a burrow scope.

And that is a long, flexible piece of hose with a camera on the end of it that we run down into the burrow.

And that allows us to see what's living inside the burrow way deep down in the total darkness and there's all kinds of things that I've been able to see on a gopher tortoise burrow scope things such as skunks and rattlesnakes and frogs and mice all live down there in the burrow simultaneously with the gopher tortoise, one of the many species of animals that utilizes gopher tortoise burrows is the eastern indigo snake.

And Eastern indigo snakes are a very important part of Alabama's biodiversity.

Unfortunately, the eastern indigo snake disappeared from Alabama somewhere around the 1950s, and we've one of the projects that we have worked hard on in the last 15 years is to reintroduce the snake into Alabama here in the Conecuh National Forest.

And so we've worked very diligently trying to get eggs and brood stock that we've placed here in the Conecuh National Forest and recently we've kind of met all the measures of success for a reintroduction project.

We've had natural born Indigos found out here in the wild.

We've, you know, released over 240 of these animals.

And these are amazing apex predators for our environment out here.

These guys eat primarily things like rattlesnakes, copperheads, cotton mouths as well as small mammals.

And frogs, even baby gopher tortoises.

But it's all balanced out in a natural ecosystem and apex predators like this are an important part of those connected pieces to the puzzle.

Well, today we're in a really beautiful area in western Jackson County, in the heart of TAG.

So TAG being Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia region region in the northeastern part of Alabama, which is a global hotspot of subterranean biodiversity.

It has an amazing collection of invertebrates, ranging from crayfish is to beetles to millipedes to raising vertebrate species like salamanders, k fishes and much, much more.

Over 170 species are known to science that have been described that our cave obligates.

So we prefer these as troglobionts species that are especially adapted for living in subterranean environments.

And there's probably many more that remain to be discovered.

So this this region in general is amazingly diverse and it's probably due to a number of interesting factors related to maybe long term climate stability, the high productivity in this region in general, caves or hostile environments.

They lack light, they lack photosynthesis.

So a lot of the energy that supports the life that is underground comes from the surface.

And a big source of input is like this large sinkhole entrance behind me.

So during a flooding event, leaf litter, debris, even carcasses of animals get washed in the cave system and the organisms that live underground use that as an important energy source.

Another reason why Alabama is such an amazing place for subterranean biodiversity is we're actually at the kind of reunion of two major karst regions in the United States.

So we have the Appalachian Valley and Ridge, which runs from North basically New York, Pennsylvania, down into Alabama, and any of the interior little plateau, which includes areas like Kentucky and Indiana, the mammoth cave area that many people might be familiar with down in our region.

And so we've had some different species that have probably been able to disperse into our area, which also is another reason why we are such an amazing place to work in and as such amazing subterranean biodiversity in general.

So why should we care and protect subterranean biodiversity in general?

So that's a really, really good question.

And that relates to some of the important ecosystem services or the benefits that biodiversity in nature provides us for free as humans and society.

So first of all, there are bats.

Many significant bat caves exist in northern northeastern Alabama, some in some cases like Fern Cave System, represent the largest hybrid or hybrid nacula for the endangered gray bat.

We're talking 1 to 2 million bats per year are roosting there during the wintertime.

When they're out on the landscape, they're eating and numerous insects and other pest species that provide perhaps millions to even billions of dollars of benefit to farmers and others on the landscape in terms of pest control.

The life of lives under ground here, including the microbes, help to purify our water, drinking water.

If you're living out in the country on unwell water or getting water from a spring, it's being purified by the life that lives in these cave systems.

And lastly, these species act as kind of bio indicators.

These canaries in the coal mine.

So when we see something happening to their population, that is a big cue or red flag that there might be an issue with the water quality and something we should pay attention to and keep eye on.

You know, every cave is is kind of created a little bit different.

So we have a situation like behind us where we have this large opening and this was a former spring that was probably issuing out of here this now that water has been parted you know, elsewhere, some of the cave systems are quite large and massive.

Multiple miles of the fern cave system is 15 plus miles now.

And, you know, discoveries are still being made there.

Others might be much smaller and some are completely filled with water, some are completely dry.

And so all these different types of cave systems, some are vertical in orientation right there in their pits.

And we have some amazing pits that are multiple hundred feet deep.

For example.

But all these different types of habitats are critically important for different groups of species.

A lot of Alabama's diversity in animals and plants, especially plants, is tied directly to the geology and the geology of Alabama perhaps it's the most diverse of any other state, and that geology has been carved up by the numerous rivers and creeks that flow through our state.

Today, I wanted to highlight one of Alabama's true treasures and biodiversity.

We're at the Bibb County Glades.

The Bibb County Glades were discovered in the nineties and ultimately published in 2001, but it was maybe the largest or most significant botanical discovery in North America.

It ultimately led to the description and naming of eight new plant taxa varieties and species.

And behind me you can see the openness of a glade glades or just bare rock with thin veneers of soil.

And that soil really takes on a chemistry of that rock pretty specifically.

So this discovery led, as I mentioned, to eight new taxa and of unrelated species and many cases in different families and things.

And so it has become sort of a mecca of botanists throughout the country to come here and see this wonderful the discovery that was made.

The discoverers his name was Jim Allison, a botanist from the state of Georgia.

Now, what makes this discovery so special is the rock, and it so highlights Alabama's diverse geology.

This particular rock is called ketona dolomite.

Ketona dolomite was named after a community in Jefferson County that's and most of that rock has been quarried or industrialized or not natural anymore.

But thankfully this exposure in Bibb County was essentially unaltered.

And so in the unaltered state we have the dolomite a ketona dolomite exposed here with this thin soil over it.

But the chemistry of that dolomite is very is very different, unique of the dolomites.

It's extremely high magnesium, higher than most other dolomites.

And so it's this high levels of magnesium and a slight alkalinity to the pH is what makes this place toxic to most other plants that try to colonize here.

But over geologic time, plants have moved in and colonized and adapted to and evolved.

That's why the species many of the species failure eight in fact eight taxa were found to be unique to the Bibb County.

glades.

So Alabama, with this tremendous biodiversity in in plant life, we have all these array of habitats and geologic formations leading to this biodiversity.

We do have a lot of rare plants.

Perhaps over 100 species are tracked by the tracking list by the Natural Heritage Program.

But we also have 23 species that are federally threatened or endangered, and that's the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife, regulating the list and keeping up to date with a new species being added.

And others are in the works as we speak.

So right here is a spot that is low and wet and open, and it is just the right habitat requirements for a number of unique plant species, including a variety of orchids that are of course very popular.

But it's a perfect setup for carnivorous plants because we've got highly leached soils, so they're low in nutrients, but there's plenty of water and plenty of sunlight.

Plants have everything they need for photosynthesis except nutrients.

Perfect set up for a plant that can supplement nutrients with their insect prey.

We've got next to us what I would call a shrub bog, similar soil and water and so forth.

And this is perfect habitat for the Pine Barrens tree frog, a species found only in this kind of habitat and very rare everywhere.

When I walk into a pitcher plant bog, I'm first struck by the beauty of all of this herbaceous diversity.

We've got a nice display of wildflowers that occur in the fall, but in the spring, in the summer, a different array of species that you can find nowhere else are gorgeous.

But when I get close to the pitcher plants, I can't help but look inside these leaves are modified as a pitfall trap and they gather all kinds of insects.

And you might think it's interesting enough to see what one of these leaves has eaten because this leaf may stand here for six months or so.

They sinuss usually in the winter and new leaves are produced in this in the spring.

But this is a record in this mass of prey here, what they've fed on all year long.

Now, that would be interesting enough, but what I really like to find are the handful of insects and mites that are adapted to live in the pitcher plant with the pitcher plant without being consumed as prey.

So here's a leaf where we can see a young exira caterpillar has made a feeding groove all the way around, causing this to wilt over and that actually closes them into a protected feeding chamber.

We can see some recent feeding here and you can see where the caterpillar, when tiny made that encircling groove that wilted the top.

And now we've got this thin tissue that maintains the shape of the pitcher and protects the inside.

So I've cut into this leaf and I knew there might be a caterpillar inside because I could see signs of its feeding.

And down below I see an accumulation of its feces or frass as we call it, for caterpillars.

And here's the culprit.

And it's a beautiful red and white striped caterpillar that knows how to live in a pitcher plant without becoming prey.

They tend to do damage to a part of a leaf, move on to another plant.

Never do they damage an entire plant or even an entire leaf.

So I like to call them benevolent herbivores.

Not exactly a mutualistic or beneficial relationship, but they are part of this whole system.

And the system works well when all the parts are present.

And we don't know how well this system will work when we start to see some of them disappear.

So Alabama is, of course an incredible place for biodiversity, but at the same time, we've got some troubles here.

If you look at all the states and ranked them for how many species have gone extinct.

Alabama ranks number two.

And if you look at states that are just on the continent of North America, we rank number one.

Hawaii is the number one state for extinctions in the US.

We're also not out of the woods yet.

Alabama is still struggling with extinction.

We ranked number three among U.S. states for species that are on the federal endangered species list.

So we rank very highly in terms of species that need our help today to stick around.

Now, keeping these species around is really important for us now and for the future.

Every time a species is lost from an ecosystem, that's one less, one less tool in nature's toolbox for providing all those ecosystem services that keep us alive and make our environment healthy in a place that we can prosper and thrive.

So every time we lose species, we're losing.

We're losing species for the future, for us and future generations.

And it's just so astonishing to be part of a place to be in a place where the diversity is so incredible and where it's not just important to me and not just important to the people I'm living around, but to the whole world.

And, you know, when you say when you say to people, Alabama is the center of hickory diversity globally, this is huge.

When you say to people that Alabama is a center for sunflower diversity globally, this is huge.

When you say to people, Alabama is the center of turtle diversity in the Western hemisphere, this is big.

I mean, we're talking about the Amazon that we're comparing this to when we say that we're the center of muscle diversity in the world.

It's huge.

And it's just this this you can't get over it.

It's a it's a sense of pride.

But, gosh, it's a it's a sense of responsibility that you just want to you just want people to understand that this is ours.

It's an asset.

How do we make use of this asset without destroying it?

How do we for once even recognize what an asset it is.

Like many areas across the state that have significant biodiversity, but particularly with cave systems and subterranean systems in general like behind me here, they're out of sight, out of mind.

So the average person is not aware of the life is living below their feet here in the northern part of the state.

And so they critically need our protection.

So that includes, you know, some of the typical things of not throwing your trash out or dumping things in sinkholes, but also paying attention to water quality.

It's possible for the really pristine areas like we're just a few miles away from the Fern Cave system, which is our most biodiverse cave with respect to obligate cave life you know, here in the state, we need to, you know, be vigilant in protecting, you know, the recharge area and whatnot.

And in some cases, if they have really significant biological resources like significant bat populations, we might need to close the caves at certain times of the year to limit access.

So in Alabama and throughout the southeast, our big rivers were in really sad shape.

In the 1960s and seventies, the Clean Water Act in 1972 really stopped our point source pollution.

That pipe coming out of a factory that waste treatment plant releasing human waste into the river and it's really cleaned it up.

We don't have those issues on a large scale anymore.

The Tennessee River, the Alabama River, the all the rivers in Alabama, they really are cleaner now than they've been in probably 150 years.

Our problem now, though, is the non-point source pollution.

You can't just point to a pipe and say that's the problem.

It's just all around us.

In our cities, we have these impervious surfaces, parking lots, rooftops, roadways, and they carry a huge amounts of rainwater after a storm into our streams and just wash out all the aquatic habitat and they carry all the pollutants, motor oil, transmission, oil, cigaret butts, all of that goes in in our rural settings you got agriculture and when the rain happens, all that topsoil washes into the streams.

So our small streams are really under a greater threat today than they've ever been, especially with all the home development.

We have the timber harvest and of course we all need to eat and the agriculture.

So we really need to work with farmers, land developers and the forestry community in having sustainable working lands, but work with them better to preserve our aquatic habitats.

And you can have both.

An example if you have a cover crop over agricultural lands during the winter, it keeps that soil out of the streams, but it also keeps the soil on the farmers fields.

The roots of that cover crop, keep the good bacteria in the soil and the farmer gets healthier yields the next year and the stream is healthier.

It's a win win if you fence the cattle out of streams now they're not urinating and defecating in the stream.

It's really much better for the aquatic environment, but it's better for the health of the cows too.

The cleaner, the water, the healthier the cows you have.

So it's just these steps such as outlined here, that we can really work with landowners to try to improve what they're doing and protect our aquatic environment.

What's the amazing thing?

You take your grand children fishing and you're sitting them on the bank of a river.

Why aren't you telling them when they're fishing here that there are more fish species, more different kinds of fish in this river than in the entire state of California?

Why aren't you telling them this?

Why don't they know this story?

Why don't they know that a mile or two of a river like the Cahaba or the paint rock has more fish diversity than many states?

Why don't we tell that story?

It's so important to understanding where we are and understanding its importance to the entire United States.

There's a lot that everybody can do.

The first thing that I always recommend is that people keep learning because you need to learn more about your neighborhood, your community, where you live, where's the nature, what species are there?

And then you can find out about, find out about ways that you can help out.

Everybody brings unique set of life experiences and talents to the table.

And then when you meet up with others in your community, they care about the same things.

You can find the creative solutions that we need for protecting nature.

And of course, if you're protecting nature, you're also protecting us humans, ourselves.

That's the kind of journey that I would love to see more people doing things like learning, sharing and doing getting things done.

Some of the concerns that citizens need to be aware of when it comes to crayfish in the state, we do have invasive species that are becoming a big problem for our native species.

These were typically brought over from bait bucket introductions, which means that people bought them for bait to be able to use with fishing, and then they weren't native to that stream or that drainage where they were using them for fishing.

So they will take over.

They will outcompete the native species for food and for shelter, and that is a huge problem.

So what we encourage people to do is when you're using crawfish for fishing bait, be sure you use the ones that are already in the stream.

There are plenty of crayfish in that stream that you're fishing in, so you just use the one for the stream that you were in.

You'll also be more successful with your fishing if you do that as well.

So it's a win win.

Another issue we have hydrologic modification.

A channelization of a lot of our waterways can create habitat issues for a lot of the crayfish that need more of a sinuous channel in a natural habitat.

They need these big open floodplains, especially some of our primary burrowing crayfish, big intact floodplains, where the water is allowed to naturally overflow and keep its space and be able to do what it needs to do as a river system.

So that is a huge concern as well as channelization.

So leaving waterways intact as they or that's two of the biggest concerns for for our species that will assist greatly with protection.

So what the public can do to assist with the situation so the state of Alabama, we have 36 different watershed groups that are focused on one two watersheds in the state.

Some of them are statewide that promote water cleanup activities like trash removal, better land use practices.

We also have you know, there is also numerous programs available to assist landowners that may have problems with with stream side erosion and stream bank loss.

So whether it's NRCS or Partners for Fish and Wildlife or a number of private programs available for that, that's those kinds of things are also available for the public to pursue.

We also have there's also like Alabama Water Watch that does on the ground water testing and teaches folks how to do water testing in their part of the state.

So there's a number of programs that have popped up because a lot of citizens, a lot of citizens are absolutely right to to defend their access to clean water.

And after all, this is the river state.

We're the only state that has the state's rivers on the official state seal.

So and they're the the other thing that makes this state so diverse and that's a key for the diversity, is that there are tens separate river basins within the state.

So because we have ten major watershed boundaries within the state, that's the main factor that drives the high diversity that we have within the state of Alabama.

So that the species that you would see in the Tennessee or or the Tennessee Basin or the Cahaba Basin or the Coosa Basin, and you move from one basin to the next, there's a big change in the species that are found there that may be found only in the Tennessee, only in the cahaba only in the Coosa and nowhere else.

We're doing a lot in Alabama to bring back Longleaf pine were just down the road from the Longleaf Alliance, which was established in the mid-nineties for the purpose of bringing back Longleaf.

And that's led to programs such as the Longleaf Initiative, which has raised millions of dollars to plant millions of pine trees and get lots of people excited about longleaf.

So we are seeing longleaf come back in places.

It's being planted.

You can't plant back the ecosystem, you can plant back the trees, you can have the trees without the ecosystem, but you can't have the ecosystem without the trees.

So there's an important connection between biodiversity and these ecosystem services that we've been talking about, ecosystems that have more species and more of their native species importantly, those ecosystem provide more services and better quality services than those ecosystems that you've lost species from due to extinction.

And so that's one of the main reasons why, just selfishly speaking, we need to keep other species around, because that way nature provides more of the ecosystem services on which we depend.

So we've talked about some of the ecosystem services that are important in our daily lives just to keep us alive, the production of clean air and clean water and the food that we get from our soils there are other ecosystem services that are important for our quality of life.

Being able to come to a place like this to play, to contemplate for some people, for a spiritual retreat that's critically important to the health of our people, to our well-being.

These areas provide a place for us to go, to get away from the hustle and bustle of our daily lives, to be able to relax, to reconnect with nature and each other in a place that's uncluttered.

With all the usual distractions psychologists are finding through scientific studies that the more time people spend in places like this, the healthier they are mentally.

They have reductions in anxiety and other problems that we have in our modern age by coming to places like this.

So it's really important that we have places like this, public spaces, but also private spaces where people can come and enjoy nature and detox for a little while and at the same time see what nature's doing for them to keep them alive.

One of the second benefits that you think about is that approximately 40% of around 40% of all pharmaceuticals on the market.

So prescription drugs theyre are rich and the molecule that does the work for that drug was discovered in some plant or animal.

So and that with improving computers and improving sequence technology, that's going to become even more important down the line.

So you're what you're talking about here is preserving a living library of genetic, molecular and and biochemical data for future generations.

So there's a there's a there's a key to this diversity that's that's unseen in importance that has enormous ramifications for biotech knowledge and and and support of human lifestyles, not to mention the fact that that these species promote watershed and water recovery statewide.

We always see the outdoors as a recreational spot, as a place where we can ride our bikes or our motorcycles or our four wheelers or, you know, enjoy the scenery.

But I'm just asking people to think about where they are, to look at where they are, to think about how unique it is.

And sometimes the most scenic thing may not be the big view.

It may be the little fish we pull out of here that has such incredible colors.

Or it may be the muscle that's actually almost flowering as it opens up and attracts fish with this incredible features in the mussels.

Those are some of the things that we we tend to overlook because we're looking for the big scenic view.

We're looking for the for the quick view, something we can see at 60 miles an hour, because that's how we're used to seeing the world through our car windows.

But get out of the car, get out of the four wheeler, come down in the water, look at what's here.

Begin to look at it, understand it, pick it up.

I hope you've enjoyed this program documenting Alabama's biodiversity.

As you probably have learned, Alabama is extremely biodiverse and there's many reasons for that, including geology, climate, topographic relief and all of our wonderful rivers.

Cutting through that very diverse geology.

We want to thank our scholars for participating.

The scholars are very accomplished in researching Alabama's biodiversity and various fields, and they have really brought a lot of information to this program.

Thank you for watching.