Our county here in SW Virginia announced yesterday plans to build a gas-fired power plant to serve data centers. It will be built feet from a primary school’s playground & less than 1mi from a nursing home, four-year college, & high-density neighborhoods. County officials are heralding it as a win.

Disappointed by this study, which promotes densely-forested areas of SWVA - home to one of Earth’s most biodiverse temperate forests & a huge C sink - as suitable for conversion into solar farms. A shocking lack of basic ecological awareness by our flagship, all in the service of energy industry PR.

Come to this story for the WTF headline. Stay for the mention that Ballad Health is buying said flood-prone land from a GOP state rep who praised the plan in Ballad’s news release without mentioning her family would be getting paid. NE Tenn./SWVA politics is insane, y’all. Just insane.

Excited to have our hellbender restoration white paper out w/ the USDA! Our multiyear work to restore ecological & hydrologic function to a degraded reach of the Holston River provides a roadmap for building climate/flood resilience into habitat projects www.landscapepartnership.org/networks/wor...

working at a university

Several local communities and their (now terminated) projects in #SWVA are featured in this piece.

Former UVA president Jim Ryan, who resigned over the summer due to pressure from the Trump Administration, just shared this 12-page letter with the Faculty Senate, detailing his experience with the Board of Visitors and DOJ. It's a surreal--and troubling--read. drive.google.com/file/d/1Is6x...

Lab member Hunter Hill and I are on Virginia NPR stations this morning to break up the depressing news cycle with some wholesome Spotted Salamander content. Big thanks to Roxy Todd for the coverage of our latest research study. www.wvtf.org/news/2025-11...

"AI is the future & a wonderful tool. We must embrace it" -every higher ed admin I've heard in a meeting over the last year. Meanwhile, here's Adobe's AI summarizing a plot showing trends in animal movements in response to precip in a grant report I'm prepping this morning. The future, everyone. 🙃

Beautiful fall day on the mountain above campus for some geoecology work as part of our USFWS-funded project on Plethodon pauleyi. Easy to forget how spoiled we are having field sites like this just a 15 min drive from the classroom door. One of many reasons why I love working in “far” SWVA.

The official USFS website right now is...something. Can't recall ever seeing the use of official govt resources for openly partisan objectives like I'm seeing today.

We've also translated our work into BMPs for mineland mgmt & reuse projects. These are critical as everyone - from conservative politicians to green groups - (inaccurately) sells old mines in #Appalachia as zero-cost sites for solar, data centers, nuke plants, & more. See: bit/ly/GrowingSm...

Our lab's latest paper reports some good news from the Virginia coalfields: Spotted #Salamanders love colonizing incidental wetlands formed on old coal mines, & now we know a little more about how & why (& which wetlands matter most). Full-text available here: digitalcommons.odu.edu/vjs/vol76/is...

The @aaup.org just shared guidance for academic workers on how to protect themselves online www.aaup.org/news/advisor...

📣We're hiring for our radio station WMMT! 📣 We're searching for a General Manager who will help carry forward WMMT's mission and keep the station thriving as a voice and resource for mountain people. Details and how to apply: appalshop.org/wmmtgm

Lost in the current hysteria over universities is that - at public schools, at least - we're not only not interested in the political views of applicants for faculty jobs but can't even ask what views those faculty hold or how they vote during the search & hiring process. It's illegal to do so.

“But now we’re very worried, because the Forest Service is actively pursuing aggressive timber targets that are unprecedented in scale and will directly harm hellbenders,” said Will Harlan, the Center's Southeast director. ⬇️

Our lab appears in this piece on coalfield solar farms. In brief: VA stripped regs requiring enviro assessments for mineland solar ➡️TNC announced, w/o such assessments, plans to build solar on mines home to at-risk wildlife ➡️we've been trying to undo the damage since. www.whro.org/virginia-cen...

AMS released a statement on climate change today that points out five foundational flaws with the Department of Energy's 2025 climate report: www.ametsoc.org/ams/about-am...

Found this momma ’mander & baby ’manders on land wrecked by past surface mining & logging above Dante, VA today. A reminder that the phrase ”Who cares? It’s just an old surface mine” minimizes natural treasures like these that deserve our respect (& more thoughtful planning for post-mining land use)

Really enjoyed this excellent feature from back in April on our lab’s hellbender habitat restoration work…& what we learned when Helene dropped a generational flood on top of it. Check it out at the link, and look for a white paper on the project later this year.

Depressing but informative piece on the “we need to clean out the streams” craze gripping #Appalachia in the wake of recent floods. Similar story to what we’ve seen with state-run ATV trail development digging out streams here in VA: regulatory agencies will turn tail & run when politics are at play

Seeing this w/ a (highly-politicized) push to develop nuclear facilities in rural coalfield towns here in #Appalachia. Feasibility studies so far have omitted any analysis or consideration of waste storage/risks, & officials punt to “don’t worry; they’ll just recycle it” when Qs come up from locals.

This situation is precisely what a number of us warned about when TNC bought 250,000 acres of the coalfields to “protect” them, w/o purchasing the underlying mineral rights. Now a portion of that for-profit carbon offset project is getting surface-mined with minimal environmental assessment.

1977: why would the bartender in star wars even care if some robots with artificial intelligence came into his bar 2025: ohhh ok

"This would nuke this creek," a Yale biologist said of a proposed data center in Alabama. The data center is projected to use more water than every home in the state and 90x the electricity of homes in Bessemer, where it's to be located. Full story: insideclimatenews.org/news/1606202...

Because you probably need a timeline cleanse right now, here’s some good news: we surpassed 5 new Virginia populations of Plethodon pauleyi this week for our lab’s new USFWS-funded project. It’s beginning to look like this ESA-petitioned species is (thankfully) much more common than we’d assumed.

I’ve heard the same argument - that dredging is a quick fix to stop flooding in #Appalachia - from local govt officials in recent meetings here in SW Virginia, just across the border from eastern KY. In reality, stream dredging makes flooding worse (see: www.kymitigation.org/wp-content/u...).

Duffield, VA - a town of 73 people covering 0.6 sq mi in the decidedly deep-red part of rural Virginia that I live in - was named to this list. Getting strong “we used AI to populate this list for us” vibes from this.

Goes without saying, but if I or someone in my position did this in a research report, I would (rightfully) end up without a job, despite having tenure. But in our current political moment, it’s just a typical Thursday evening.

Setting aside the obvious ethical & 1st Amendment issues with this, one of the ongoing federally-funded research projects in my lab has now spanned 3 different presidential administrations. Our work, which is apolitical, happens on vastly different timescales from partisan politics.

It is beyond annoying to hear the refrain that inland flooding from Helene was some wildly unpredictable event. Catastrophic flooding across the southern Apps from those setups is such a well-documented phenomenon that we have covered it in my *ecology* class for the past 15 yrs here in SW Virginia

“Life’s hard, man. Like, have you ever been tryin’ to get it on with your lady in a mud puddle and some guy just swims over and sits there, watching you doin’ it, and won’t leave? Some days are like that, man.”

Is it a perfect system without flaws or controversy? Hardly. But to claim that no one knows how policy decisions are made at higher ed institutions is inaccurate to the point of being bizarre.

While arguing that higher ed institutions keep their decision-making processes shrouded in mystery, this piece conveniently omits that - at public institutions like mine, at least - most admin bodies & committees keep public minutes from meetings that are themselves open to the public.

Here comes Brood XIV of Periodical Cicadas, which are emerging from the soil in huge numbers here at the house this evening after 17 yrs belowground. Ready for the squealin’ to commence.

Gorgeous spring hike in the Jefferson NF here in Wise County today. Visible in the background (L side of image) is Brumley Mtn, with Holston Mtn and the Iron Mtns near Damascus, VA & the NC line visible on the far horizon.

Excited to launch a new State Wildlife Grant on the newly-described Plethodon pauleyi. An impressive undergrad team’s habitat analysis from last fall is helping us locate new pops of this enigmatic species, w/ almost 20% of all of Virginia’s known individuals of the species recorded in the last week

Sad to see this news, but I always had questions about this project. Awarding $ to monitor enviro outcomes in the TN watershed while most of the big-ticket interventions were happening in the Ohio drainage seemed nonsensical to me from a scientific perspective. cardinalnews.org/2025/05/05/e...

Not to be That Guy™, but “direct” & “inverse” are the opposite things from one another in the context of a correlation, making this a nonsensical statement. But anyway, municipal drinking water standards for fluoride are well below levels of neurological concern.

A moment of zen as spring comes to the highcountry at one of our wetland field sites this afternoon.

Catching up with colleagues and I feel like "have any of your grants been terminated yet" is the new "have you had COVID yet" from 2022 and I hate it.

On Earth Day, don't miss @jackiefmogensen.bsky.social 's story about a rare salamander at threat of extinction from climate chaos, sprawl, and Trump—and the passionate biologists determined not to let us turn our backs on it www.motherjones.com/environment/...

Really enjoyed speaking with @jackiefmogensen.bsky.social at @motherjones.com for this piece on Helene's impacts on #Appalachia. The story discusses our long-term river restoration work & how ongoing attacks on science by the Trump admin might impact regional conservation efforts.

The last thing our streams in #Appalachia need post-Helene, esp on “conservation” lands. View last weekend from East TN’s Doe Mtn - a Nature Conservancy-linked property - of a streambed excavated & turned into an ATV trail. In the Watauga River drainage, which is struggling to recover post-Helene.

NCCC was a vital program that has helped with both storm cleanup & economic development work in rural #Appalachia. The development of most of our local parks in SWVA, which are a key component of economic diversification efforts, relied heavily on the program.

Some of the ESA’s biggest wins have come from partnerships between conservationists & industry that allow economic activity to continue while protecting the habitat of listed wildlife. Policy anrguments aside, the Trump admin’s assertion that the ESA is an anti-industry law is flatly untrue.

Great overview of the complexities of salvage logging operations. I was in a meeting just last night where local govt officials were indignant that the USFS follows environmental rules when logging. This piece does a good job explaining what those rules do & why they’re important for #conservation.

The original plans for my annual Nat Hist of the Appalachians course fieldtrip got scuttled by 12 degree wind chills at Grayson Highlands this morning, so we stayed local for work on our project on climate resilience in D. ochrophaeus instead. Hiking thru a rime forest on the way out was a bonus.

Really great coverage of how the administration has thoughtlesly and cruelly yanked needed funding for community projects in Central Appalachia cardinalnews.org/2025/04/07/t...