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Photo by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Jason Throneberry, with The Nature Conservancy, talks about some of the work being done by the Conservancy with rivers in Alabama, including the Cahaba River in Trussville.
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Photo by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Water flows in the Cahaba River in Trussville.
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Photo by Gary Lloyd.
The Cahaba River behind Hewitt-Trussville High School.
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Photo by Erin Nelson Sweeney.
Jason Throneberry, with The Nature Conservancy, stands along the Cahaba River underneath the bridge on Cherokee Drive in Trussville.
It was a sunny April day — Earth Day, to be exact — and Jason Throneberry, the director of freshwater programs for The Nature Conservancy in Alabama, was walking the greenway near the Trussville Senior Activity Center.
He was talking about a blossoming interest in the environment and the work to build bypass channels around two dams on the Alabama River to allow various species to pass.
Throneberry, who moved to Trussville two years ago but has lived in Alabama for about eight years, grew up in Arkansas just south of Little Rock. He grew up hunting and fishing at the pinnacle of the outdoors. Accessible from his hometown were the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers and the Mississippi Delta. “I just gained a love for it, doing that growing up,” Throneberry said. He moved to Tennessee to earn his master’s degree, where he also served as a river raft guide. He studied fisheries and wildlife biology.
“That really opened my eyes to there being careers out here where you can do environmental work,” Throneberry said. “There are so many facets. You don’t have to manage a pond or grow trout. There are so many different facets to that. I really kind of grasped onto the native species, the rare species that people don’t think about.”
He returned to Arkansas to work for the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission as an aquatic ecologist, then earned his role with The Nature Conservancy in Alabama.
He focuses on river restoration, aquatic connectivity and urban environments. Standing under the Rock Bridge on Cherokee Drive in Trussville, he described the Cahaba River as great recreationally.
“The opportunities are endless, and it’s still in really good shape, relatively speaking,” Throneberry said. “From a work standpoint, it is the most biologically diverse river in Alabama and one of the most diverse in all of North America. So, this is one of the hotspots of biodiversity.” Throneberry is currently working on a handful of stream restorations across rural Alabama, none more key than the lower Alabama River project, which is probably “the most pressing,” Throneberry said.
A $160 million program with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers focuses on building bypass channels around two dams on the Alabama River, channels that would allow sturgeon, paddlefish, mussels, mullet, skipjack herring and striped bass to migrate freely. Once upon a time, before dams, migratory fish runs included sturgeon making their way all the way to the Appalachian Mountains.
That doesn’t happen anymore, due in large part to the construction of dams and the change of riverine ecosystems into a series of manmade reservoirs. The project’s purpose is not only to allow fish to move around the dams, but also to reconnect the Gulf of Mexico to the Appalachian Mountains via the Alabama and Cahaba rivers. Ensuring that the historic habitat the fish need remains is key, so the goal is to work from top to bottom and bottom to top.
In a nutshell, Throneberry is working all over Alabama. In describing the project, putting a label on it, he was firm: “The most significant ecological restoration in North America.”
According to The Nature Conservancy, the federal government will contribute $105 million, but the requirement of a non-federal sponsor to foot 35% of the total cost (or $56.4 million) has fallen on The Nature Conservancy.
“In this career path, you have to be willing to do whatever,” Throneberry said. “If you need to get out on a boat, you need to sample fish, or talk to people or just be a tour guide, that’s what you have to do. I now know more about policy than I ever cared, but it’s a part of it. I think I’m good at it. I seem to be pretty good at it, but it’s a whole new world for me.”
One of the species that Throneberry is working hard to save is the Alabama sturgeon, a fish he has never actually seen. He might never see one — few people have in the last couple decades. His task is somewhat akin to the old aphorism, “Plant-ing a tree you will never sit under.”
He hopes Alabama sturgeon are still in these waters, somewhere. “We know they’re there,” he said. “The last one was collected years and years and years ago. I don’t know the exact date. I have never personally seen one.
There are still ecological DNA hits, where you just take a water sample, you have primers for this DNA, you run the sample and it says, ‘Hey, we got a hit for this fish’ because we have the genetic code. So, there is still hope.”
The Nature Conservancy is not currently the non-federal sponsor for implementation of the project, just the feasibility study. TNC is trying to actively raise money to financially empower whoever the sponsor will be, which is yet to be determined.
