Living Rivers: Arteries of the Eastern Forest
Signature Species of North America's Temperate Broadleaf Forest
Arc of Appalachia Preserve System, Southern Ohio

This course is now past but may be offered again in the future.

This course focuses on what makes North America's Eastern temperate forest unique among temperate forests of the world. Although our country's Eastern Forest shares many of its tree and mammal genera with Europe and Eastern Asia, our native forest has one major component that -- when compared to the other temperate forest centers of Europe and Eastern Asia-- distinguishes it globally. Quite simply, the Eastern temperate forest claims some of the highest aquatic life diversity in the temperate world, in some cases, the entire world. For example, one healthy river in a southeastern U.S. forest harbors more species of fresh-water fish than all the rivers of Europe combined. Darters, one of the most colorful of our native fish, are found only in North America, radiating into over 100 species, each one as beautiful as a gleaming jewel.

But fish are just the beginning of the eastern America's biodiversity story. Eastern forest watersheds also claim nearly 60% of the world's crayfish species, 30-40% of the world's stonefly and mayfly species, and more fresh-water turtle and fresh-water mussel species than any other country in the world. Over 350 species of mussels once lived in the eastern forest rivers, compared to less than ten species in western United States and Europe. Perhaps the most significant species of America's eastern temperate forest, however, is the lungless salamander. An estimated 40% of the world’s total salamander species are found in the U.S. and the vast majority live east of the Great Plains. One hundred of the 140 described salamander species in the U.S. belong to the Lungless Salamander family known as Plethodontidae, a type of salamander found almost no where else on the planet. In undisturbed intact forests, salamanders can be the highest vertebrate contributor to forest biomass, averaging up to two adults per square meter.

In the ecologically-intact watersheds of our pre-European settlement days, all of these animals--fish, crayfish, turtles, aquatic insects, and mussels--contributed to the base of a food pyramid that, just a few hundred years ago, supported an immense pageantry of larger forms of wildlife that stunned explorers from the Old World. Conservation challenges now make these waterways one of our most imperiled forest ecosystem components. This course will help you appreciate the ecology of the Eastern forest through study of its lifeblood -- its rivers and streams. Academic experts and researchers in the fields of botany, mussels, crayfish, fish and salamanders will be leading this course--giving participants a global, conceptual and cross-disciplinary foundation of knowledge. A substantial amount of our time will be spent in the field, especially in the water, becoming familiar with the signature species of the Eastern Forest and learning the importance of the waters that nourish them.