Hello everyone and welcome to the Indefensive Plants podcast, the official podcast of

Ineventiveplants.com. What's up? This is your host, Matt. Welcome to the show. How is everyone doing this week? Today, we're taking a deep dive into an ecosystem very near and dear to my heart. If you live up north, you'll see red spruce, Pisia Rubens, and a lot of places. But if you follow the Appalachian mountains down south, they get

rarer and rarer. These trees and the ecosystems they comprise follow the mountains south as the

glaciers pushed them that way, and they've been kind of hanging on in these isolated mountain

islands ever since. But over the last hundred years or so, these ecosystems have taken a real

hit due to logging and

fire and a bunch of other disturbances.

But to try to understand how to restore them, you kind of have to understand the soils.

And as you're going to hear, these trees are ecosystem engineers that interact with an influence

and create their own soil type, which then helps foster more red spruce and red spruce dependent species.

Joining us to talk about this is Dr. Jim Thompson. He is as he describes a soil geographer, and he

has a fascinating perspective on the system and what can be done potentially in the future to restore

it and potentially even help mitigate climate change in the long run. I'm not going to do it any justice in this intro, but before we get to that, did you know I have a book? It's called In Defensive Plants and Exploration Into the Wonder of Plants. You can help support the podcast by buying a copy of this book, and you can find that in the show notes for this episode over at indefensiveplants.com slash podcast, so consider picking up a copy today.

But that's enough out of me. Let's get into this conversation because it's incredible. Without

further ado, here's my conversation with Dr. Jim Thompson, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I am super excited to talk to you today. But first, let's start with an introduction. Tell everyone a little bit about who you are and what it is you do

Well, I'm I'm Jim Thompson. I'm a professor of soil science at West Virginia University

And here at at WVU I have a teaching and research appointment but also do some service related to

The thing that I love soils and so I teach several classes but also do research on on mostly the soils of West Virginia. Excellent beautiful state.

Great great area to be working in but what brought you to soils in the first place?

I mean, were you always into soils?

Were you kind of a geologist?

Where did it all begin for you?

...