Hobcaw Barony · South Carolina · A RICE project
Reading Between the Tides
Hobcaw Barony and the Historical Ecology of Estuarine Futures
At Hobcaw Barony, we use sediment cores, tree rings, and monitoring records to trace how rice cultivation and later management shaped the wetlands we see today.
In the news
The research
How do we protect a place whose defining quality is change?
At Hobcaw Barony on the South Carolina coast, freshwater wetlands grade into brackish and saltwater environments. Reading Between the Tides brings sediment cores, tree rings, and long-term environmental monitoring together to investigate how this landscape has changed and where the effects of past land use remain in its present ecology.
Monitoring records how these wetlands are changing now. Sediment cores and tree rings extend that history: sediments can preserve traces of earlier wetland conditions and cultivation, while tree rings record changes in the forests themselves. Their dates differ in precision. Read together, they can help distinguish recent changes from processes that began well before monitoring was established.
The project is part of RICE, GeoArches’ research on the historical ecology of tidal rice wetlands.
Hobcaw within forNature
Environmental history and the future of the estuary
The National Geographic Society and forNature have included Reed Goodman’s Hobcaw research among ten Explorer-led Rights of Nature initiatives. At Hobcaw, the research contributes an account of environmental and land-use history to discussions about the future of the estuary.
National Geographic’s forNature program
In the news
'This is history in soil': At Georgetown's Hobcaw Barony, past and future of SC is coated in mud
The Post and Courier
National Geographic Society and forNature Award 10 Explorer-Led Rights of Nature Initiatives
National Geographic Society
Looking to the past to protect South Carolina’s coastal future
Clemson News
