Louisiana Conservation News

On a chilly late February morning, GulfCorps members laced up their boots, applied bug spray and headed down muddy trails shrouded in fog at Sam Houston Jones State Park in Lake Charles. The group was on the hunt for longleaf pine saplings growing among the shoulder-high Bluestem native grasses that have come up at the park.

The Nature Conservancy’s Gulf Conservation Manager, Karrie Arnold, and TNC GulfCorps Operations Coordinator Bird Davidson, drove in from Alabama and Florida to lead the group in a sentinel monitoring project at the Louisiana state park. TNC has been helping to replant and restore the park after it suffered severe damage in Hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020.

Encompassing 1,087 acres of mixed pine and hardwood forests, lakes and rivers, Sam Houston Jones State Park experienced a massive loss of established longleaf pine trees (Pinus palustris) during the hurricanes. After the storms, the park started removing the debris. In 2021, GulfCorps began partnering with TNC and Louisiana State Parks to restore Sam Houston Jones’ ecosystem by planting longleaf pine trees.

GulfCorps, a project of TNC and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), creates jobs for young adults in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. The teams provide extra muscle and energy for tasks that restore natural habitats on critical conservation lands across the Gulf Coast. Launched in 2017 thanks to a $7 million grant to TNC from the RESTORE Council, and administered by NOAA, GulfCorps represents a collaboration among TNC, the Student Conservation Association, The Corps Network, the Ember Alliance and three other conservation corps working on the ground in the region.

On this windless February day, the team’s job was to document the newly planted longleaf pines’ growth as part of the larger conservation efforts at the park. “We come back annually to sentinel spots, designated points, to see the difference,” Arnold said.

Since the devastating hurricanes, TNC’s Louisiana Treesilience and other TNC programs funded the planting of about 11,745 seedlings at Sam Houston Jones State Park.

The GulfCorps sentinel monitoring project tracks the growth and survival of the trees, Arnold explained as she demonstrated how to locate specific monitoring plots. These teams also document other vegetation growing around the trees and compare the data to information collected during previous monitoring sessions. Like a conservation Easter egg hunt, they spread out at one spot, hunting for saplings among the tall grass.  

“We found 13,” called out a team member as the group gathered and began documenting the vegetation.

Longleaf pine saplings start out in a grass stage, where they look less like a tree and more like a bush. During this stage, the plants focus on building a strong root system before transitioning into a period of rapid growth called the “bottlebrush” stage. According to the Longleaf Alliance, once a longleaf bottlebrush reaches about 6 to 10 feet in height, lateral branches begin to emerge. The trees then spend their energy growing tall. Mature longleaf pine trees can reach more than 120 feet.

TNC is working to restore this important species across the Southeastern United States. “Longleaf pines once dominated the coastal plain, blanketing more than 90 million acres,” according to nature.org. “Today there are just 5.2 million acres, up from a historical low of 3.2 million acres two decades ago.”

Reforesting Sam Houston Jones State Park’s longleaf pines should make the park more resilient to future storms. Longleaf pines have a deep root system that makes the plants more tolerant to drought and helps them to survive high winds better than other trees. Longleaf pines also are adapted to fire, which could help the forest survive wildfires expected during periods of drought.

As the team scouted the park, finding the trees, excitement grew in the GulfCorps members. “This is an awesome success story,” Arnold said. “The pine trees last year were all in the grassy stage and the native (Bluestem) grasses were all about waist high. Now those grasses are shoulder high.”

From a young age growing up on 21 acres in western Louisiana, Tareesa Sevilla was drawn to the outdoors. In adulthood, it took some time to determine how that passion might translate into a career. After some fits and starts, including time spent on a pre-veterinarian track, she took a break to re-think her professional path.

“Upon returning to college, a career counselor brought the conservation field to my attention,” Tareesa says. “After some research, I said to myself, ‘This is it.’”

With a natural resource conservation management degree under her belt, Tareesa worked in seasonal technician jobs before recently accepting a position as a land steward with The Nature Conservancy. In this role, she is charged with monitoring several of TNC’s nature preserves in Louisiana and implementing management strategies that include prescribed burning, invasive vegetation removal, tree planting, trail maintenance and other duties.

When she isn’t working, Tareesa enjoys getting her nature fix at Sam Houston Jones State Park, located near her home in Lake Charles. She will work out of a home office as the only TNC staff member located in this part of the state.

“While new on the job and to TNC, I am taking time to learn about each preserve and their individual needs,” she adds. “Depending on the season, I expect to be out and about quite a bit. Stewarding what we have here in Louisiana is a great responsibility and a role that I am honored to assume.”

Staff from The Nature Conservancy recently convened with peers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, and the U.S. Forest Service to learn about how to prepare a site to support the federally endangered and globally imperiled dusky gopher frog (Lithobates sevosus). The meeting took place at the De Soto National Forest in Mississippi, near a site where remaining populations of the frog survive.

TNC is exploring the prospect of preparing a portion of its Talisheek Pine Wetlands Preserve in St. Tammany Parish to potentially welcoming these fragile amphibians back to Louisiana. 

“We are involved because TNC is one of the only private landowners in the state who manage property harboring potentially ideal habitat—longleaf pine woodlands interspersed with seasonal wetlands—for this species,” says Seth Blitch, TNC’s director of conservation in Louisiana.

Native to parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, the dusky gopher frog now only survives at a handful of locations in south Mississippi. This decline is primarily due to the loss of longleaf pine habitat, a fire-dependent ecosystem that has gradually disappeared throughout the southeastern United States. According to Blitch, TNC delivers periodic controlled burning to mimic this historic natural disturbance to improve the health and resilience of longleaf pine woodlands at its preserves. The frog also needs shallow, seasonally flooded depression ponds embedded within these woodlands in order to breed.

While formal arrangements for bringing the frogs back to Louisiana are not yet secured, TNC plans to restore a portion of the Talisheek Preserve identified as having conditions key to supporting dusky gopher frogs. 

“It’s an involved process, from using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) remote sensing technology for siting ponds to studying the area’s hydrology and soils,” explains Blitch. “It’s exciting to be involved with recovering an endangered species. This would be our first time reintroducing a vertebrate on a TNC property in Louisiana. We look forward to reporting back as the project unfolds.”

The humble oyster serves a vital purpose in coastal Louisiana—far beyond its starring role on po-boys and at raw bars. Oyster reefs buffer and stabilize shorelines to prevent erosion, slow wave energy and protect billions of dollars in infrastructure.

Reefs built by The Nature Conservancy in Calcasieu Lake are working to do just that. TNC’s Oyster Reef Restoration and Shoreline Protection project in West Cove of Calcasieu Lake recently got good news from its monitoring. The reef is protecting more than four miles of shoreline along Sabine National Wildlife Refuge. The Louisiana State University (LSU) AgCenter monitors TNC’s oyster projects and found strong oyster recruitment at all four project phases and survival and growth at the older reefs.

The first phase at Calcasieu Lake, which was completed in 2017, has created a well-established oyster reef containing diverse multi-age oyster populations.The reef is not only slowing shoreline erosion, but the shoreline is also showing accretion.The reef was originally built of galvanized steel gabion units, but those units over time have disappeared as planned, and a solid, 3-foot to 4-foot-wide natural oyster reef has formed.

Since 2009, TNC has collaborated with many partners to construct oyster reefs  along 10 miles of vulnerable coastal marshes in southeast and southwest Louisiana. Many of the created reefs have had a positive effect on slowing shoreline retreat, with an average 50 percent reduction in erosion at some reef sites versus the reference sites without reefs.

The partners involved with the Calcasieu Lake project include the State of Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, Cummins Foundation, Coypu Foundation, CITGO, Chevron, US Fish & Wildlife Service, Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, and the LSU AgCenter.