Group to survey Helene-hit areas along Appalachian Trail

Landslides, washed out roads and tons of debris affected the Appalachian Trail last year. One organization will help document where the landscape along the trail now stands. MountainTrue, a western North Carolina-based nonprofit that serves East Tennessee counties, will use grant funds awarded by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy to inventory natural resources along the trail's landscape. The organization will specifically collect inventories in Tennessee and North Carolina affected by Hurricane Helene and under the stewardship of the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. "The idea is that with better information, land trusts can make better use of their limited funding to steward the land they have," said Josh Kelly, resilient forests director at MountainTrue. The project will document any issues along the landscape that need addressing, like erosion, clearing roads and invasive species, as well as documenting different natural communities and rare species living on the parcels of land. "Many of these [parcels of land] have been in private ownership for centuries and are just recently in conservation ownership and have never had a baseline biological inventory or anything like that," Kelly said. "So without that kind of information, you don't exactly know what to do because you don't know what's there." MountainTrue was granted $15,000 for the project. The money is part of a new "community resiliency" fund category from the ATC to support communities along the Appalachian Trail who have been affected by Hurricane Helene. "It doesn't just focus on the footprint of the trail itself, but the landscape surrounding the trail," Kelly said. Kelly said sections of forest that were heavily impacted by Helene will take longer to inventory. "It's really hard to move through blown down forest and things like that," he said. The community can take part in resource inventories through a "bioblitz" event, a citizen science program where people help gather scientific information. MountainTrue organizes a group of naturalists who lead groups of people to document as much about a land parcel as they can in a day. Kelly said the organization will likely host at least one bioblitz as part of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy recovery grant in the next year. "It's visionary of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy to provide funding like this for the whole landscape and the community surrounding the trail," Kelly said. "It's an acknowledgement of how connected recreation, conservation and local communities are."