The Nature Conservancy

Go Deeper

Restoring Coastal Habitats for People and Nature
For more than 40 years, the Conservancy has been working at more than two dozen sites across the Gulf of Mexico to restore and sustainably manage forests, grasslands, marshes and coastal areas.

The Nature Conservancy in Texas
We have conserved more than 750,000 acres of land and water throughout Texas.

The Nature Conservancy in Louisiana
The Nature Conservancy has helped preserve more than 300,000 acres of critical habitat in Louisiana.

Wendy Jo Ledbetter remembers The Nature Conservancy’s Wier Woods Preserve near Beaumont, Texas, as a place where hooded warblers twittered among the creamy-white magnolia flowers. Then Hurricane Rita toppled more than half the preserve’s trees, and nearly three years later, the preserve is still a tangle of trunks and tree limbs.“Even though it’s natural, it’s painful to see it,” says Ledbetter, who directs Conservancy projects in southeast Texas.

At the Conservancy’s White Kitchen Preserve in eastern Louisiana, Hurricane Katrina’s tidal surge plowed away 60 acres of floating marsh. Ducks now paddle on open water where herons once lurked among grasses, says Nelwyn McInnis, the Conservancy’s Central Gulf Co-op director.

Conservancy preserves all along the Gulf Coast are still recovering from the effects of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But the restoration of natural areas damaged by the 2005 hurricanes has largely been overshadowed by the devastating toll the hurricanes had on human lives and property.

“Everyone we know has stories about something that happened to them during those storms,” says Rick Jacob, director of conservation forestry for the Conservancy’s Louisiana chapter. “And so does every acre of land.”

Preserve-by-preserve observations of which tree species survived the storms mesh with a study published last November in the journal Science, which found that Katrina killed about 320 million large trees. Carbon released by those rotting trees equals the amount of carbon absorbed in one year by all other forests in the United States. The study suggests that this large-scale forest loss could help accelerate climate change.

While hurricanes Katrina and Rita were natural events in an ecosystem adapted to hurricanes, human impacts on the landscape have altered the course of nature’s recovery. Invasive plants and habitat fragmentation, as well as dams and canals that have altered the flow of water, are all affecting the recovery of the region’s natural areas.

In the region’s hardwood bottoms, home to large-crowned trees such as water oaks and sweet gum, hurricane damage has gouged out sunny openings where fast-growing and non-native Chinese tallow trees and cogon grass are taking root.

Throughout the area, tractors clearing debris from streams to protect homes from flooding have sometimes degraded and altered the course of many waterways.

“We call it the storm after the storm,” says McInnis.

Areas with healthy, functioning ecosystems fared best. The marshes at the mouth of the mostly free-flowing Pearl River survived the storm with moderate damage, says McInnis. Nearby wetlands along the Mississippi River, which had been altered by the river’s extensive levee system, did not do as well, she says.

White Kitchen is beginning to show signs of regeneration. A 90-year-old eagle’s nest survived the storm, and an eagle pair returned this year to raise their young at the preserve. “I’ve tried to appreciate the naturalness of the storm,” says McInnis. “But I never want to go through another one.”

—Madeline Bodin

Nature picture credits: Photo © Matthew White (At the Conservancy’s White Kitchen Preserve, Hurricane Katrina plowed away 60 acres of marshland , leaving stretches of open water in its wake.)