Highlands Biological Station · Field Dispatches
Notes from the Field
Researcher spotlights, current projects, and discoveries from one of the most biologically rich corners of the Southern Appalachians.
About the series
Science, fieldwork, and the people behind it
Every summer, scientists arrive at Highlands Biological Station to study the salamanders, plants, forests, and waters of the southern Blue Ridge — a global biodiversity hotspot. Notes from the Field follows that work as it happens.
Each dispatch pairs original research with the photography, fieldwork, and first-person reflection that bring it to life — from a single salamander on a rainy trail to a tree ring five centuries old.
Researcher spotlights
Conversations with the visiting scientists who make HBS their field laboratory.
Current research
Projects underway right now across the Highlands Plateau.
HBS staff research
Discoveries led by the Station’s own scientists, archivists, and educators.
Featured dispatch
Puzzling the Grassy Archipelago
Why do Roan Mountain’s grassy balds stay open when forest surrounds them? Jim Costa follows a clue from Wallace’s 1858 notebook.
in this edition
in the Little Tennessee
Southern Appalachians
Highlands Plateau
The field notes
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Showing all 21 dispatches.
Featured
Puzzling the Grassy Archipelago
Why do Roan Mountain’s grassy balds stay open when forest surrounds them? Jim Costa follows a clue from Wallace’s 1858 notebook.
Research Abroad
From Highlands to Tsukuba
Highlands Biological Station’s microplastics research traveled to the SETAC Asia-Pacific Biennial Conference in Japan, where four Station-affiliated projects joined the conversation.
A Field Guide to Roadside Wildflowers At Full Speed
Most wildflower guides want you kneeling in a prairie with a hand lens. This one assumes you are on the interstate, you have somewhere to be, and you get about a second to decide what that streak was.
What the Lake Reveals
A rare American Bittern, a hidden beaver tunnel, and a pollinator garden: Canty Worley on what Lindenwood Lake at Highlands Biological Station reveals.
Under a Flat Rock in Hall Creek
There are whole worlds moving quietly beneath the stones of our mountain streams. Most of us pass right over them, following the water downstream, never knowing what we've missed. Last September, researcher Sandy Kawano lifted a flat rock in Hall Creek and found twenty-five pale yellow salamander eggs tucked against its underside. It was a small discovery, easy enough to overlook, but one worth writing down.
HBS Staff Research
The Grove Quartet
Four trees a few yards apart across a creek, begun in 1559, 1725, 1795 and 1843. Liam Stiefel turned every ring into a note in G major so the grove could be heard together.
Current Research · with UNC Research
Five of the Six
A UNC team led by Field Site Director Dr. Rada Petric is tracking endangered bats across Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point. Nearly everyone on it came through HBS first.
From the Botanical Gardens
What We Gather
Like Aesop’s ant and grasshopper, the gardens take stock as fall arrives: migrants raiding the last of the fruit, the final flowers blooming as the first leaves drop, and storms that show how fragile and resilient these mountains are.
From the Pages of Nature Magazine
The Fall of a Tree
On a windless June morning in the Great Smokies, two hikers heard a long-dead hemlock, some four centuries old, let go of the mountain. Ralph M. Sargent’s 1948 essay, in full.
The Bartram Walk at HBS
Thirty plants connected to John and William Bartram, and two ways to walk among them.
What the Rain Carried
When Hurricane Helene dropped 20 to 30 inches of rain on the southern Blue Ridge, it also delivered something no one could see. A three-site study, with samplers running straight through the storm, measured how much.
From the Botanical Gardens
Nothing Stays Still
Horticultural Specialist Canty Worley looks back on a season in the Highlands Botanical Gardens — from Skunk Cabbage pushing through the frost to the first hint of fall — and on what it means to care for a place as it nears its centennial.
Campus Field Notes
Leave it to Beaver
In July, something started stacking sticks against the culvert on the path to North Campus. We pointed a trail camera at it and left. Four weeks of frames later, the dam — and the stream behind it — look nothing like they did.
Grant-in-Aid Spotlight
A Fish with No Name
The Smoky Dace has never been formally described, yet it counts among the sensitive species used to grade stream health in western North Carolina. Tayton Alvis took thirty years of biomonitoring data and seventeen streams of new fieldwork to see whether that designation holds.
A hemlock keeps time
Core COK021 carries 466 rings — 466 growing seasons, written down one at a time. Liam Stiefel gave each ring a note. Wide rings ring high, narrow rings ring low, and the whole life runs past in sixty-five seconds.
Researcher Spotlight
From the Andes to Appalachia, a Young Biologist Finds Common Ground
Juan Pablo Castro came north from Quito for the salamanders and stayed for everything else — respirometry benches, abandoned mines, high-elevation bat acoustics, and his first morning of bird banding. The Highlands Plateau, he found, reads a lot like an Andean cloud forest.
HBS Staff Research
Shocking News from the Cullasaja River
High school students wade into a mountain river with Dr. Bill McLarney of Mainspring Conservation Trust to count its fish — stunned, identified, released. Nineteen species this year, including the rare Wounded Darter, on a reach surveyed every summer since 1991.
Reading the Rings: In the Field with Liam
Follow a single tree core from start to finish as Liam demonstrates increment boring in the field, with a film by Canty Worley and an animated guide to how a core is read.
A Garden is a Verb
Wednesday is volunteer day at the Station. A morning clearing grass and blackberry from the Butterfly Garden shows how a garden is renewed, season after season, by the people who tend it.
A Note from our Executive Director
A Field Course Far Afield
Executive Director Jim Costa is just back from Ecuador and the fourth run of his Temperate–Tropical Ecology & Biogeography course. With Highlands as the Appalachian base and Wildsumaco Biological Station high in the Andes as the other, students compared firsthand how geology, elevation, and latitude shape two very different living worlds.
Current Research
The Salamanders Remember
Eighteen years, sixteen plots, and more than 35,000 captures: one of the world’s largest salamander studies reads an Appalachian forest’s recovery from logging and wildfire — one marked salamander at a time.
Grant-in-Aid Spotlight
After Dark, Following Salamanders Up the Mountain
As night falls over Nantahala National Forest, doctoral student David Adams and undergraduate Evie Bradley track the Southern Gray-Cheeked Salamander from low slope to high — a Grant-in-Aid mark-recapture study of how a warming climate is reshaping the most salamander-rich landscape on Earth.
Field Course
Learning to Hear the Forest
At an intensive two-week ornithology course in the North Carolina mountains, students learn to read an entire landscape by ear — and this year, seven full scholarships from Headwaters Bird Alliance decided who got to stand in the cold and listen.
HBS Staff Research
A Long-Dead Hemlock Still Has Stories to Tell
A 1928 museum specimen may extend the Plateau’s tree-ring record past five centuries, revealing drought, growth, and forest change recorded ring by ring.
Current Research
A Plant Hidden by Water
Kral’s water plantain is known from just six populations on Earth. Grant-in-Aid researcher Jake Thompson recreates the Little River’s currents in living stream tanks to learn how the threatened aquatic plant grows, flowers, and might be saved.
HBS Staff Research
The Air We Breathe, the Water We Share
Associate Director Jason Love traces microplastics through Western North Carolina — from rivers and forest soils to the rain itself — and asks what “pristine” really means.
Field Notes
Field Notes from 2025: Monitoring Bats in a Changing Appalachia
Research Assistant Adriana Kirk reflects on a season checking abandoned mines and caves for hibernating bats — from white-nose syndrome to a record count of 27 tricolored bats deep underground.
Field Notes
Field Notes from 2025: A Naturalist’s Postgrad Journey
After graduating, Research Assistant Hannah Shepard traded screens for trails — 100+ miles on the Appalachian Trail, spruce–fir summits, bat surveys, and her first green salamanders.
Researcher Spotlight
Dr. Joey Shaw: Plants, Plateaus, and a Passion for Teaching
A botanist and teacher on ferns, sedges, and wetland flora across the Highlands Plateau — and his mission to bridge technical botany with public curiosity.
Researcher Spotlight
In Focus: Salamanders, Science, and the Art of Seeing Nature
Biologist and photographer Todd Pierson on the alternative mating tactics of two-lined salamanders, mentoring students in the field, and capturing amphibian life through his lens.
Current Research
Deep Roots, Cold Streams
A decades-long collaboration decoding the chemical courtship of plethodontid salamanders — and the mentorship legacy that keeps drawing scientists back to HBS.
Boulders and Bats and Bears
Winter is the one reliable time each year to count hibernating bats, so the team heads into the caves and old mines the Station monitors with the U.S. Forest Service and the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission.
Angry Bird
A male Northern Cardinal picks up a piece of gravel and strikes his own reflection in a car mirror. A chance sighting in the Smokies became a published record of a bird using a tool in an act of aggression.
We inherit this place, care for it a little while and then pass it along — hopefully a little richer, more resilient and more alive than when we found it.
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Field science continues here
The work in these dispatches depends on the people, programs, and support behind Highlands Biological Station. Here’s how to go deeper.
Notes from the Field is published by Highlands Biological Station, a center of Western Carolina University fostering research, education, and conservation in the southern Blue Ridge. Photography by Juan Pablo Castro, Grant Connette, Todd Pierson, Damien Wilburn, David Adams, Evie Bradley, Canty Worley, and Highlands Biological Station staff.