The Joseph W. Jones Ecological Research Center is located on Ichauway, a 29,000 acre property in rural southwestern Georgia. Ichauway was established as a quail hunting reserve in the 1920s by Robert W. Woodruff, the long-serving chairman of The Coca-Cola Company. There are now 85 fulltime employees at the Center working in research, forest and wildlife management, outreach, and administrative support. The Jones Center seeks to understand, demonstrate and promote excellence in natural resource management and conservation on the landscape of the southeastern Coastal Plain of the U.S. The Jones Center’s research programs focus on two broad themes: the ecology, restoration and management of the longleaf pine ecosystem and water resources (wetlands and aquatic ecosystems) in the southeastern Coastal Plain. Our objective is to contribute to a scientific understanding of the ecosystems and to provide information to support the development of sound resource management plans and policies. We balance basic research of the ecology of these systems with application-oriented studies relevant to natural resource management and conservation. Much of the research is integrated under five long-term multidisciplinary projects that are supported by core funding from the Jones Center. Rather than operating as an open biological field station, Center scientists and targeted collaborators conduct research on the Ichauway property.
Results/Conclusions .
The results of our scientific research, as well as information generated from our conservation and land management programs, are shared with a diverse constituency including natural resource management agencies, policymakers, private land owners, conservation organizations and university classes. These groups visit Ichauway for field tours, short courses and workshops. Center staff are also actively engaged in collaborative partnerships at the state, regional and national level, complementing our work on site at Ichauway. Such information transfer influences conservation and management at many levels of public and private land ownership and policy decisions. Graduate student advisement is promoted through collaborative arrangements with several universities, and research is conducted at Ichauway on topics within the framework of the core research areas. All of these activities are aimed at sharing our scientific and management ethic of restoring and conserving native ecosystems through the careful use of fire and silviculture. We gauge our success by looking at typical measures of productivity (publications, grants funded) but also by looking at discipline of, geographic location of, and acreage influenced by, those who are engaged by our advisement, demonstrations, classes and field training.