Good morning! My name is Dr. Edward
Crawford and I am the director wetlands
studies here at the VCU Walter and
Inger Rice River Center for
Environmental Life Sciences.
I oversee wetlands research on this
500-acre property which is
adjacent to James River.
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in 1927 a gentleman by the name of King Fulton
came out here and dammed up the mouth of Kimages Creek
which flows right here in to the James
River. [He] dammed up the mouth
and then cut down
all the forested species of trees species that were growing here.
We removed the dam with the help of the
American Rivers project
and the Nature Conservancy
reestablishing tidal
communication with Kimages Creek
and the James River. That's going to
provide a lot of ecosystem services
such as allowing new habitats for fish and for birds
and for insects. This is the largest
wetland
and stream restoration effort in the
state of Virginia as well as in the
mid-atlantic region.
One of my research projects here is to go out
and geo-locate
each stump and right now we're up to
about 6,000 stumps
that were growing in the wetland prior
to 1927.
So we go out and geo-reference each
stump then we cut a
cross section of the stump, we take that back to lab,
we grind it down so that we can read the
tissue and then identify the plants that were growing out here prior to 1927
We're trying to recreate a virtual swamp.
Now this research- it's hard work, hot,
your gonna be covered in mud, you're going to be sinking up to you knees in muck...
but it's very rewarding
Students love coming out here, putting on
hip waders and chest waders
walking around in the marsh you get to see amazing natural beauty,
you get to witness all
types of ecological
interactions that are going on whether
it's predation or competition, and the data that you are collecting,
whether with me or other researchers
out here, is eventually going to
be used to hopefully
impact environmental policy in the future
for Virginia and potentially for the
mid-atlantic region
fantastic opportunity to "get your feet wet"
and learning more than you ever could sitting in a classroom
about the importance of ecosystems and how they impact you and
how they're impacted by you.
 
 
There's another cypress tree right there, beautiful, huge,
and you can see if you look down on
the ground right here
cypress needles and these needles
actually will fall off during this time of year
hence the name bald cypress
this species right here is one of the primary species I'm trying to
reintroduce on the other side of the
property
in our big 70 acre wetland restoration
 
