Black Run Preserve, located in the heart of Burlington County’s Evesham Township, is a 1,300-acre parcel of land permanently protected from development to ensure the preservation of the area’s Pineland ecology. One of many such preserves in New Jersey’s stretch of Atlantic Coastal Pine Barrens, the Black Run Preserve lies at the western edge of the larger ecosystem, acting as Evesham Township’s gateway to the Pinelands.
“This used to be cranberry farms,” said Friends of the Black Run Preserve member Ron Pugh, explaining the preserve’s history. “Cranberries were commercially grown up until about 1965, at which time there was a cancer scare that almost killed the whole industry. The two families … that were doing it here commercially, their kids were getting older and no longer interested in farming … so they said ‘We can sell it.’ The township had Green Acres money, about $5 million, and bought these 1,300 acres of the northwest corner of the Pine Barrens.”
The New Jersey Pinelands are a part of the larger Atlantic Coastal Pine Barrens ecoregion, a biome defined by nutrient-poor sandy soil. The ecosystem’s unique soil composition defines the ecosystem’s flora, ensuring that only hardy plants (like the pine trees the ecoregion is named for) that can survive in nutrient-poor environments can survive, and with it, the nature of the biome’s ecology as a whole. While unsuited to supporting most crops, the sandy soil does lend itself to cranberry cultivation, explaining why the bogs were such a staple in the area’s past.
The land’s shift from farmland to preserve came as a result of the Green Acres program, a public fund to conserve New Jersey natural land, ensures the preserve remains a publicly-supported natural space, free from the perils of development. Reclamation is a running theme throughout Black Run, as on the eastern side of the tract, what was once an airfield now sits only as a barren stretch of sand, slowly giving way to the forest surrounding it. While the rows and rows of cranberry plants are long-gone, traces of the area’s cranberry heritage still remain throughout the preserve: the rotting remains of machinery for flooding and damming cranberry bogs still dot the landscape, and in the depressions where cranberries once grew, beavers have dammed the waters themselves, flooding the bogs once again and creating always-flooded ponds throughout the preserve.
“While the Black Run Preserve is owned by Evesham Township, the Friends of the Black Run Preserve are the stewards of the land,” said the organization’s president Jane Dean.
Through land management and community outreach, organizing events like their February tracking hike to create opportunities for engagement with the preserve within the Evesham community, the Friends of the Black Run Preserve work to ensure both the integrity of the preserve, and the understanding within the broader community as to why that integrity is so important.
Unfortunately though, in recent years, the job of maintaining the preserve has grown much more difficult in the face of a series of threats.
“We’ve had, unfortunately, four suspicious fires,” said Pugh, “we had a bridge between two of the bogs … the beaver were using it as part of their dam, and we were gonna come out and clean it up on a weekend. Thursday before that weekend, one of our people was out here and she smelled smoke: she tracked it down, someone had set fire to that.”
While fires are an essential part of the Pinelands ecosystem, and the Friends of the Black Run organize controlled burns for safety reasons and for ecosystem renewal, suspicious fires are of great concern, both to the Friends of the Black Run, and residents living in the heavily forested communities surrounding the preserve.
“I’ve got pictures where the fires are right up near the backyards of people’s houses up here,” Pugh said. “You just have to have it all controlled.”
As temperatures grow warmer and droughts become more frequent as a result of the changing climate—coupled with the increasing amount of people living in the Pine Barrens as a result of increased development—wildfires are likely to increase in frequency and destructiveness. This potential keeps the Friends of the Black Run vigilant as they look towards the preserve’s future.
Increased risk of fires, while the easiest to see the immediate consequences of, is far from the only threat the preserve faces from the threat of human activity within its land; the Friends of the Black Run note that everything from simple littering to even changes in soil chemistry can come as a result of human activity within the preserve.
“We’re trying to maintain it as best we can while still making it passive recreation area, but we try to maintain certain standards,” said Pugh. “We ask if people bring their dogs in here, that they keep them on leash, and if they keep allowing them to pee and poop wherever they want, that changes the pH [of the soil], because most domestic animals eat nutritious food … it would take a lot of that, but it does affect along the trails, it changes the pH.”
The Atlantic Coastal Pine Barrens, the larger ecoregion Black Run is a part of, is made unique by the distinct qualities of its nutrient-poor, sandy soil. As Dr. Nathan Ruhl, a professor of Pine Barrens ecology at Rowan University, explains, disruptions to those qualities may carry consequences for the broader ecosystem.
“The Pine Barrens is what it is … because, in large part, that low-nutrient environment,” said Ruhl, “so, if you add nutrients to that system, you’re shifting that system toward something that it hasn’t historically been, you’re shifting it toward something that would favor other species like oak trees rather than the pine trees, and other species too. You’re making it more like people’s backyards than the Pine Barrens.”
Though the threats to the preserve and its unique Pineland ecology are growing, the Friends of the Black Run Preserve continue to volunteer their time and energy to their mission of protection and preservation.
“We share the same flora, fauna, and features of the Pine Barrens … so we’re trying to keep it that way the best as we can,” said Pugh. “We’re the basic volunteer stewards.”
