How a species of bamboo could help protect the South from future floods

In early 2024, Michael Fedoroff traveled to Tuckabum Creek in York County, Alabama. The environmental anthropologist was there to help plant 300 stems of river cane, a bamboo plant native to North America, on a strip of eroded and degraded wetland: a “gnarly” and “nasty” area, according to Fedoroff. If successful, this plantation would constitute the largest sugarcane restoration project in Alabama history. He and his team buried the stalks in the ground, propped them up with hay, left and hoped for the best.

A few days later, rains swept through the area and the river rose 9 feet. “We were terrified,” Fedoroff said. He and his team rushed to the site, expecting to find bare earth. Instead, they found that the river canes had survived – as had the stream banks.

Rivercane lined the streams, rivers, and bogs of the Southeast, from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Mississippi Delta. Thick yellow stems and feathery leaves reaching up to 20 feet in the sky, so dense that riders on horseback would move rather than venture. In the soil beneath the sugarcane stands, rhizomes – gnarled stems just below the soil surface – stretched for acres.

When Europeans settled the lands that would become North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama, they uprooted trees and vegetation to make way for agriculture and development. Pigs ate sugarcane rhizomes and cows nibbled on the developing shoots. Today, thanks to this dramatic upheaval of the landscape, more than 98 percent of river canes have disappeared. According to Fedoroff, of these dense and abundant stands, called canebrakes, only about a dozen remain in the entire country.

But as the Tuckabum Creek project demonstrated, river cane provided a vital bulwark against the ravages of flooding. This vast network of strong underground stems held soil and stream banks in place more effectively than any other vegetation, even when rivers were high. And as the South faces a surge in climate-driven disasters, like Hurricane Helen last year, a small, dedicated network of scientists, volunteers, indigenous stakeholders and landowners is working to bring the plant back.

During Helene, the few waterways lined with river rods fared much better than those that weren’t, said Adam Griffith, a river rod expert at an N.C. Cooperative Extension outpost in Cherokee. “I saw the devastation of the rivers,” Griffith said. He had considered retiring from his involvement in river cane restoration, but re-engaged after the hurricane. “If the native vegetation had been there, the stream banks would have been in much better condition,” he said.

These enthusiasts are ushering in a “cane renaissance,” according to Fedoroff, who directs the University of Alabama program that hosts the Rivercane Restoration Alliance, or RRA, a network of pro-cane groups. The RRA and its allies replant sugarcane where it once thrived, maintain existing sugarcane and stands, and educate landowners and the general public about the benefits of cane. In addition to these rhizomes that save waterways from devastating erosion, sugarcane also provides crucial habitat for native species, such as cane moths, and filters nitrates and other pollutants from the water.

“When people accept cane into their hearts, beautiful things happen,” said Fedoroff, whose team now has a $3.8 million grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to work on cane projects in 12 Southeast states.

Large restoration projects like this often involve the collaboration of many major stakeholders: the Tuckabum Creek Project, for example, Loop in the RRA, the Westervelt Timber and Land Management Company, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Rivercane enthusiasts have emphasized that consultation and inclusion of tribes is essential to the return of this plant to the landscape. Not only does river cane provide ecological benefits, but it also plays a cultural role for tribes, one that was lost as the plant declined.

Historically, indigenous peoples of the Southeast used river cane to make items such as baskets, blowguns and arrows, but today many artisans have turned to synthetic materials for these crafts, said Ryan Spring, a historian and member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

When Spring started working on the tribe 14 years ago, no one knew much about the ecology of river canes, he said. Today, Spring actively participates in refocusing river cane in the cultural and ecological landscape. “We build a community, we cull them, teach them ecology,” Spring said. “Many are basket weavers, and now they are using river canes for the first time to make baskets. »

The dream of restoring sugarcane to its former prolific glory in the South East presents challenges. One of them is education: for example, river cane is often confused with invasive Chinese bamboo, meaning landowners and managers usually don’t think twice about removing it. Another obstacle to restoration efforts is the cost and availability of sugarcane plants. They are not easy to find at nurseries and can cost $50 to $60 per plant or more, according to Laura Young of the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation.

But Young found a way around this problem. She works on habitat and riverbank restoration in southeastern Virginia, and six years ago she wanted to plant a sugarcane tree along a river near the small town of Jonesville. The cost was prohibitive and so Young pioneered a method now colloquially known as the “cane train”. She gathered pieces of cane rhizome, planted them in sandwich bags filled with soil, then started a cane plant with the propagated cuttings — all for $6.

Fedoroff pointed out that the cane train method has a major drawback: Different varieties of river cane are better suited to, say, humid or sunny locations, so transplanting cuttings that thrived in one area could result in a pile of dead plants in another. In his lab, researchers are working to sequence river cane genomes so they can compare the characteristics of different plants and choose the best varieties for different locations. But, Young added, while the propagation method is imperfect, it is cheap, easy and better than nothing. Of the 200 factories in its initial project, 60 have taken off.

“Rivercane is a bit like investing,” she said. “You don’t get rich quick. You just need to invest time and money every year, and it pays off exponentially.”

The cane train also provides a low-investment way for volunteers and private landowners to get involved in stream bank stabilization. Yancey County, North Carolina is home to many creeks and creeks that suffered significant erosion damage during Hurricane Helene. This spring, the county government, in partnership with several state and local groups, led a group of volunteers in a river rod restoration project. They harvested thousands of rhizomes, contacted landowners along the county’s devastated waterways and planted nearly 700 seedlings, a process they will repeat in 2026. “The county really showed up,” said Keira Albert, restoration coordinator at the Beacon Network, a disaster recovery organization that helped lead the project.

That’s part of the power of a solution like planting river canes: it’s a practical and simple way for ordinary landowners and volunteers to care for the landscape around them. “There is a lot of pessimism when we think about climate change,” Fedoroff said. “We’re paralyzed. But we’re trying to take a different approach. We can’t go back to that original state, but we can envision a better future ecology.”