Tidal impoundments in South Carolina are cultural landscapes deeply intertwined with the historical legacy of colonial-era plantation agriculture and global wetland management practices. Historically, enslaved labor transformed extensive areas of southeastern coastal estuaries from cypress-tupelo swamps into managed freshwater rice impoundments, creating enduring networks of dikes and channels prominently featured in the Grand Strand region today. These relict landscapes currently offer significant ecosystem services, such as wildlife habitat provision, flood mitigation, and biogeochemical processing. The RICE (Researching Impoundments for Conservation Ecology) project is a long-term, interdisciplinary research initiative focused on studying antebellum rice fields as integrated socioecological systems. The project evaluates their potential to enhance coastal resilience, cultural landscape conservation, and public engagement, while simultaneously recovering poorly documented and rapidly disappearing aspects of Gullah-Geechee lifeways. Employing geoarchaeological and historical methodologies, RICE investigates the impacts of historical land-use transformations and contemporary sea-level rise on sedimentation dynamics, vegetation patterns, and carbon accumulation across a gradient of historic rice impoundments under varied management regimes. By examining ecological processes at multiple spatial and temporal scales, RICE seeks to provide insights into the ecological resilience and broader socioecological value of these historical wetlands, thereby informing current conservation approaches and adaptive management practices.
