PrimalNature.org
2/17/08 Old-Growth Researcher to Receive Conservation Award
The North Carolina Wildlife Federation will present its Forest Conservationist of the Year Award to Rob Messick February 23, 2008, in Durham, North Carolina. The Federation will recognize Messick for his work to document and protect old-growth forests in western North Carolina and beyond.
Messick has carried out extensive forest inventory work on public and private lands in the southern mountains for over a decade. In 2000 he published Old-Growth Forest Communities in the Nantahala-Pisgah National Forest and a Site Specific Catalog: Old-Growth Communities in the Nantahala-Pisgah National Forest. The twin publications, based on research by Messick and by some fifty other people going back to the 1970s, document 77,000 acres of Class A and Class B old growth in the two national forests. In 2001, as a result of these catalogs, The Wilderness Society selected Messick for the Olaus and Margaret Murie Award in recognition of his tireless efforts to document and protect old growth in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
In 2004 Messick created a catalog High Quality Reconnaissance and Verification in Old Growth Forests of the Blue Ridge Province, which presents brief accounts of old-growth forest areas and candidate site on twelve mountain ranges, mostly in Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The catalog was never publicly released, in part because of the sensitive nature of the material, but the candidate sites became a basis for additional field work.
The organizations with which he has carried out professional forest inventory work include the Foothills Conservancy (of Morganton, NC), Georgia Forest Watch, the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project, the Southern Environmental Law Center, Virginia Forest Watch, and the Western North Carolina Alliance. He has also conducted research under contract with the U.S. Forest Service. In addition, to educate conservationists and the public about old growth, he has taught classes and led numerous trips to old-growth sites.
Since 1995, in addition to his field research, writing, and teaching on old growth, Messick has gathered and compiled information on the history of North Carolina forests and, in particular, on W. W. Ashe, an important but little-known figure in early U.S. Forest Service and conservation history. At a conference on old-growth forests, held in June, 2007, at Pine Mountain State Resort Park in Kentucky, Messick presented A Sketch of Early Forest Conservation in Eastern Kentucky. He is currently writing a biography of Ashe.