@wsmith1
Conservation Biologist and Associate Professor at The University of Virginia’s College at Wise; herp nerd and occasional poet exploring the edges of people, ecology, and place. Current VP for Southwest Virginia’s The Clinch Coalition.
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...
A green graphic promoting that Appalshop is hiring.
📣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.
Yeah, I think politics is mostly behind it here in SWVA. Lots of money to be made by some politically-connected VIPs when regs don’t have to be followed (& in some cases, public money changing hands between those VIPs & reg agencies themselves, which further muddies the water…pun intended).
Oh yeah, for sure. In our area, all that is nested in a broader issue of (some, not all) agencies endorsing large-scale unpermitted stream disturbance as a conservation measure. I’ve sat in a mtg where DEQ said stream excavation is a “beneficial use” of public waterways that does not need permitting
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...).