The woods at Colbert Ferry, milepost 327.3 of the Natchez Trace Parkway, on the Colbert County side of the Tennessee River, are the Alabama site in the long-term vegetation monitoring the National Park Service runs along the parkway. When the Gulf Coast Inventory and Monitoring Network sampled its five sites in the 2021 growing season, Colbert Ferry had the fewest plant species: 99 across the six of its seven permanent plots that were sampled, with one plot holding only 31, the lowest of any plot on the parkway, against 106 in a plot at Meriwether Lewis in Tennessee. The network tied the low count to fewer wildflowers and grasses than at the other sites.
Colbert Ferry also had the fewest seedlings and saplings of any site, though the network judged regeneration generally positive everywhere it sampled, and it had more standing dead trees and fewer live adult trees than the others. Japanese stiltgrass, an invasive annual grass from Asia, averaged more than 45 percent of the understory cover in two of its plots. The plots, 20 meters on a side, were first visited in the winters of 2018 and 2019.
The ground differs from the hills to the south. The federal ecoregion map puts Colbert Ferry in the Eastern Highland Rim of the Interior Plateau, on Mississippian limestone and chert, while the Freedom Hills, ten miles down the parkway, lie in the Transition Hills of the Southeastern Plains. The park's 2016 vegetation mapping report describes the parkway between mileposts 324 and 362 as alternating between the Highland Rim and the Coastal Plain, marking the transition between warm and cool temperate climates.
Getting there
34.8404, -87.9448
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
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