ASHEVILLE ― The next threat to Western North Carolina’s storm-battered wildlife could come from decisions made in the name of recovery, two Asheville-area conservation advocates warn.
Nearly two years after Tropical Storm Helene, efforts to understand damage to streams and forests are colliding with a push to remove fallen timber and weaken environmental safeguards, according to Ben Prater and Tracy Davids of Defenders of Wildlife, a national conservation organization that works to protect and preserve their habitats. The group's work includes field research, public education and advocacy for public lands and the Endangered Species Act.
Prater, the organization’s Southeast program director, said those choices and the way they are made by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service, could compound the storm’s damage before researchers fully understand what survived and which species need help.
“You can't say you're going to conserve species while destroying the very homes they need,” Prater told the Citizen Times Sept. 17.
Prater identified several overlapping concerns, including efforts to rescind federal roadless area protections, environmental policy rollbacks affecting which waterways receive federal oversight and a proposed change to the definition of “harm” under the Endangered Species Act.
His concern about that definition centers on habitat. Narrowing protections against habitat destruction, he said, would undermine efforts to protect animals whose survival depends on the condition of their surroundings.
He also warned that reducing protections for roadless forests could expose relatively intact areas to new roads and logging. Changes to federal water protections, he said, leave fewer safeguards as development proceeds, including on private property.
For Prater, those policies converge in the mountains’ headwaters, where keeping forests intact helps maintain clean water for species that already were struggling before Helene.
He pointed to high-elevation forests in Mitchell and Yancey counties and Pisgah National Forest’s Appalachian Ranger District, including steep slopes near the Appalachian Trail corridor, as places where salvage logging to clear downed trees raises concerns about downstream habitat if allowed.
Those waters support native brook trout and imperiled aquatic species like hellbenders and certain mussels. Disturbing the forests above them could create another obstacle to recovery below.
Holding on beneath the surface
Davids, senior representative for the Defenders of Wildlife Southeast Field Team, works on protecting and fostering the recovery of imperiled species across Southern Appalachia. She pays particular attention to cerulean warblers and eastern hellbenders.
Hellbenders, in particular, have become something of a regional mascot across WNC; closely associated with pristine mountain streams, North America’s largest salamander is a “species of special concern,” according to state conservation officials.
Davids' recent fieldwork offers both encouragement and caution.
During a survey with Clemson University researchers in Pisgah National Forest a few weeks ago, Davids said, the team detected more than 100 hellbenders in one area.
“They've held on after Helene,” she said.
The researchers found animals of different ages, including a larval hellbender — evidence Davids said indicates breeding. But that finding represents conditions in one location, not a verdict on the species’ recovery across the region.
Elsewhere, Davids said, heavy equipment used to remove storm debris entered streams, bulldozed habitat and crushed rocks the hellbenders use for nesting. In some of those places, researchers have not seen hellbenders as they had in previous years.
The contrast illustrates why more surveys are needed before drawing broad conclusions about the storm’s consequences, Davids said. Prater described Pisgah National Forest’s streams, particularly those in the Pisgah Ranger District, as important strongholds for hellbenders.
Above those streams, another recovery story is unfolding in the forest canopy.
Davids has surveyed cerulean warblers in mature forests in the Appalachian Ranger District, including areas where she said logging could threaten them. Those forests provide breeding grounds to which migratory songbirds return year after year.
Fallen trees such as those downed in Helene can help sustain that habitat, she said, sheltering animals, retaining moisture and supporting insects that are food for birds and other wildlife.
The trees, Davids said, are “not doing anybody any harm.”
Helene also opened gaps in the canopy that can benefit birds and other animals, she said. Removing additional trees could add disturbances where the storm already has changed the forest’s structure.
When cleanup cuts deeper
Prater said the organization does not oppose all logging. Forest management can improve habitat, particularly in places altered by earlier logging, and removing downed and damaged trees near homes and communities can help address wildfire risks.
But he questioned applying the same approach deep inside wet Appalachian forests, far from development. Salvage operations can require roads and cutting live trees to reach fallen timber, he said, while removing material that would otherwise return nutrients to forest soils. Describing the additional impact of that work, Prater said, “We're sort of layering on an unnatural disturbance.”
The distinction matters because a forest’s response to a storm is not necessarily the same as a neighborhood’s. Material that obstructs a road or threatens a house can serve a different purpose on a remote mountainside.
Davids described fallen trees in the forests she surveys as part of a functioning habitat, and said recovery decisions should account for those benefits alongside risks to nearby communities. Prater added that public review should weigh those tradeoffs before operations move forward. The question extends beyond which trees should stay or go. It includes who gets to help decide.
Prater said wildfire mitigation and salvage logging are being used to justify moving projects forward without meaningful public engagement, even as agencies receive resources to carry out recovery work.
Davids said that approach threatens decades of cooperation between land managers, conservation organizations and residents.
A public stake
Public involvement, Prater said, gives agencies access to local knowledge and expertise that can expose problems, identify alternatives and improve projects before work begins.
He described collaboration as a practical tool for sound management, drawing on years of work alongside federal land managers. Excluding communities, he argued, risks losing that accumulated knowledge just as decisions about storm recovery carry lasting consequences.
His prescription is to restore opportunities for informed public participation and collaborative forest management. Both Davids and Prater lived through Helene, and Prater said the storm reinforced the importance of neighbors finding common ground and solving problems together.
Federal agencies have expertise and an essential stewardship role, he said, but those responsibilities cannot be fulfilled effectively without listening to the people affected.
Ultimately, as Prater put it, “human beings and our communities and this wildlife will inherit the decisions and the impacts that are wrought on these public lands, which we know are vital for sustaining and providing the resilience that our landscapes depend on to be sustained through time.”
Cory Vaillancourt is the Helene Recovery/Investigations Reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times. Find him on X at @The_CoryV or on Signal, via email at cvaillancourt@citizentimes.com or at 912-508-5640.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: WNC wildlife faces ‘unnatural disturbance’ after Helene
