BLACKSBURG, Va. – What was once an everyday sight around our region is gradually vanishing before our eyes, but a graduate student at Virginia Tech is researching if a species of tree that used to be common in Southern Appalachia can thrive in the area again.
The red spruce used to be common across Southwest Virginia, but due to a shifting climate and severe logging practices, the species is now a rare sight.
“They used to be found all the way down to Georgia thousands of years ago. … They’ve kind of moved upwards as the climate has changed. And now they are more continuous in like New England, Canada and the northern Appalachians,” said Brenn Kurtz, a Virginia Tech graduate student.
The lumber was once coveted as material for making instruments at the turn of the 20th century. Now, if you want to find a red spruce in the New River Valley, you can only find them above 4,000 feet in unique environments called sky islands.
“So, they are on the highest peaks in the southern Appalachians, and they can’t really go up any more in elevation now,” Kurtz said.
“These individual populations are extremely unique. You can be near the bottom of the mountain and it’s springtime. And you can go to the top and there’s still sideways snow flurries,” said John Seiler, a Virginia Tech professor of forest biology.
The closest sky islands to Virginia Tech are in the Grayson Highlands and at War Spur Ridge near Mountain Lake. But to find a red spruce in the wild, it takes a long trek off the beaten path. Still, the isolated populations may hold the key to restoration.
“We were kind of focusing on just seeing if it has that capability to acclimate to a warmer growing condition. And we are trying to see that if there’s possibilities of using specific seed sources for like restoration and conservation of the southern Appalachian red spruce populations,” Kurtz said.
“As these things continue to move north or rather high in elevation, some of these islands will sort of pop off the top of the mountain. Like potentially right here in the New River Valley, Mountain Lake, the red spruce are just barely hanging on there,” Seiler said.
And if the populations continue diminishing, Virginia might be deprived of something special and unique to the region.
“They kind of create this really like magical refuge for a lot of different species. And it just harbors a very unique ecosystem on these mountaintops,” Kurtz said.