White oak, ramps, dogwood. All these are plants important to the Cherokee tradition, and the Forest Service has teamed with the Cherokee to expand scientific and cultural understanding of these plants and more on the part of Cherokee students.

Poaching isn’t just about the illegal harvest of elephant tusks and rhino horns – it can be a serious issue here in the southern Appalachians, impacting game animals, hurting the chances of recovering endangered species, and affecting our ability to continue harvesting traditional forest products like ginseng.

Many people have heard about white-nose syndrome, the fungal disease responsible for killing more than a million bats in the eastern United States that has left biologists, researchers, and land managers scrambling to halt its spread and reverse the damage done – an effort still very much under way, and far, far from completion.

The North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission and the National Wild Turkey Federation are offering free turkey hunting seminars across North Carolina in March and April in anticipation of the spring turkey season

Researchers recently found a nuisance algae in Jackson County’s Tuckasegee River, prompting calls for anglers to be especially diligent when cleaning fishing equipment.

Power companies, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, and state and federal agencies have come together to conserve the sicklefin redhorse, a fish found in only six Appalachian counties worldwide and being considered for the federal endangered species list.

Tax time approaches, and in North Carolina this provides an easy opportunity to support wildlife conservation.

Over 50 years ago, Congress created the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a program that uses revenues from offshore oil and gas drilling in public waters to purchase land and easements for conservation and public recreation. The program has supported more than 42,000 national, state and local parks and outdoor recreation projects in all 50 states.

According to U.S. Forest Service researchers and their partners, between 2000 and 2012 the world lost 660,000 square miles of forest, an area more than twice the size of Texas.

All American eels hatch from eggs in the Sargasso Sea, an area of the Atlantic Ocean east of the Bahamas and south of Bermuda. From there, the young eels head west, swimming up streams from Canada to South America, where they spend most of their lives, returning to the ocean to reproduce and die.