RICE, Researching Impoundments for Conservation Ecology
The afterlives of tidal rice landscapes.
RICE investigates how historic rice impoundments, landscapes built through enslaved labor, continue to organize wetland hydrology, ecology, heritage, and conservation choices in the South Carolina Lowcountry.
The place
A wetland still structured by rice.
Across the Lowcountry, dikes, canals, trunks, field divisions, and altered river margins remain legible centuries after the region’s plantation rice economy declined.
These features were created through the knowledge and coerced labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants. They converted forested and tidal wetlands into highly controlled agricultural systems while embedding violence, skill, and environmental transformation in the land itself.
Today, some impoundments remain actively managed; others are breached, abandoned, or incorporated into wildlife refuges, private properties, and conservation lands. Their ecological functions cannot be separated from their historical formation. RICE begins from that inseparability.
The questions
What persists when an agricultural system becomes a conservation landscape?
01
How does management alter hydroperiod?
We examine how intact gates, breached dikes, river connection, elevation, and maintenance affect the timing, depth, duration, and frequency of inundation.
02
What do the sediments record?
Cores and surface-elevation records track mineral inputs, organic accumulation, carbon burial, salinity shifts, and the imprint of past cultivation and later management.
03
Whose history guides the future?
We ask how descendant knowledge, archival evidence, archaeology, ecology, and land-management goals can be brought together without reducing the landscape to either habitat or monument.
The investigation
From dike crest to buried soil.
RICE works across transects that connect river channels, impounded fields, interior wetlands, upland margins, and natural marsh controls.
- RTK and aerial mapping locate subtle elevation, channels, dikes, and former field divisions.
- Sediment cores recover sequences for bulk density, organic matter, grain size, elemental and mineralogical composition, pollen, environmental DNA, and chronometric dating.
- Surface-elevation tables and marker horizons measure contemporary elevation change and sediment accretion.
- Historical maps, plantation records, archaeological survey, and oral and community histories situate environmental measurements within the systems that produced them.
- Comparisons among managed, breached, and natural wetlands test how inherited infrastructure shapes present ecological function.
Why it matters
Conservation inherits history whether it acknowledges it or not.
Decisions about gates, breaches, habitat, carbon, flooding, and public access are also decisions about a cultural landscape formed through enslavement and sustained through generations of Black environmental knowledge.
RICE aims to produce evidence that is useful for wetland managers and conservation practitioners while keeping descendant histories central to the interpretation of value. The project does not treat ecosystem services as a redemptive endpoint. It asks how ecological futures can be pursued with fuller historical accountability.
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