Blue Ridge Snorkel Trail celebrates kickoff 

When the impending closure of Canton’s paper mill was announced in March, conservation professionals predicted a swift improvement  in downstream water quality once papermaking stopped.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to list the green floater, a freshwater mussel found in North Carolina, as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

Three new species of spiders have been discovered in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, bringing the total number of new-to-science species found in the park through Discover Life in America’s All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory project to 1,079 since the project launched in 1998.

To the Editor:

Since its inception Lake Junaluska has been a beacon and home to some of God’s most beautiful creatures.

Located up a narrow mountain road in a building about the size of an average single-family house, the Balsam Mountain Trust Nature Center is tiny compared to Executive Director Michael Wall’s last professional home, the San Diego Natural History Museum in California. 

As days lengthen and temperatures rise, black bears begin to move around in the woods searching for insects, nuts and berries. They also look for food in the gateway communities outside Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The N.C. House of Representatives has filed a budget bill that includes $5 million for infrastructure to reduce wildlife-vehicle collisions across the state, earning applause from the Safe Passage Fund Coalition.

After more than three years of research and analysis, a group focused on ending wildlife-vehicle collisions in the Pigeon River Gorge has released a report outlining its recommendations for keeping them safe from traffic.

It was around 1 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 4, when Ken Brown’s phone started lighting up with photo texts depicting a massive sediment load dropping into the Oconaluftee River below Ela Dam, also known as the Bryson Hydroelectric Project. Within half an hour, he was standing on the riverbank.