Tracking how seeds travel in the Southern Appalachians

All these trees have been planted by, at least the fleshy fruiting trees, have been planted by some animal some decades ago. We are in the Mountain Lake Wilderness, which is a part of George Washington and Jefferson National Forest. We have a sea dispersal project here where we've set up a lot of cameras on the most abundant fruiting species to see what comes to eat and what disperses them likely. This study is basically, like peeping into the secret life of, like, animals behind our backs. I think as a process, seed dispersal is highly underappreciated. Everyone just assumes that all the fruit and those seeds get somewhere somehow. They move around, and there's lots of them, and they get everywhere, but something has to actually move them. This is one of the first studies in this region to look at many of these fleshy fruited plant species here to see what's visiting them. And that's important, not only because it's a important part of the natural history for any plant. That's how they get to a new spot. But it's also important in terms of climate change. Because as climate is changing, their ranges are likely to shift to either higher in elevation or further north in latitude. So there's lots of work that's been shown making predictions about where plants are going to move with climate change, but there's not very much work that's been done to see if they can actually get there. The first step of that is figuring out who's moving them. Once we establish what eats what and we look at the connections and the network of interactions, then the second step is to see how interdependent the interactions are, and then climate change could result in mismatch of interactions, so there could be a mismatch in the time the plant is fruiting and the time when the animals are ready to disperse them. I grew up in India, and I'm from India. So I've always been interested in natural history and wildlife. This was the first time I came to the US, and apart from the culture, like, even the forests were entirely new. So I was a little disoriented in the beginning. So far, the journey has been great in terms of all the resources and the support that I've gotten from my advisor and the department and CNRE. The process of doing science is a really valuable process that, Abir as a graduate student, he's been developing this project alongside me. It's his PhD project, so I think it will give him a lot of experience to help him down the road in his career. And I think similarly for Baxter and Claire, as undergrads, they're trying to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their lives. And, in the Wildlife Department, there's a lot of focus on the animals, and one of the cool things about this research is not only is a focus on the animals, but also really is a strong focus on the plant. The diversity of the Southern Appalachians is really impressive, and there's a lot of fleshy fruited plant species, and people just haven't studied this yet. And so it's neat to be able to add a research project in our own backyard that is focusing on something that's relatively underappreciated.