By Cameron Baxley
February 25, 2026:
If you’ve ever walked along a creek or wetland and looked down at the muddy bank, you might not have thought much about what’s beneath your feet. But that mud holds a surprisingly detailed record of history — and learning to read it is exactly what brought our team out to Bee Tree Slough recently.
We spent the day collecting sediment cores and surface samples from the floodplain, levees, and slough channel to better understand how this landscape has changed over time. It sounds simple enough, but there’s a lot of careful science that goes into figuring out where to look, what to collect, and what it all means once you’re back in the lab.
Our main goal was to collect sediment cores — essentially long cylinders of mud extracted from the ground — from the floodplain on either side of the slough. Each core is about 50 cm long and captures sediment that has been slowly building up over many decades, sometimes centuries. By analyzing these cores in the lab using a technique called Pb-210 and Cs-137 dating, we can figure out roughly when each layer was deposited. These are naturally occurring radioactive elements that settle out of the atmosphere and accumulate in sediment, decaying at predictable rates, acting like a built-in clock. The result is a timeline that tells us how fast sediment has been piling up — and whether that rate and the composition of the material has changed over the years.
Why does that matter? Sedimentation rates are a window into the health and history of a landscape. Changes in land use, flooding patterns, or restoration efforts can all leave a mark in the sediment record. Being able to read that record helps us understand what has changed, and guides decisions about how to manage and restore places like Bee Tree Slough going forward.
Sloughs like Bee Tree are dynamic, ecologically rich environments, but they’ve also been shaped by a long history of human activity — dredging, diking, agriculture, and more. Understanding the sediment record helps us piece together that history and see how the landscape has responded. It also helps us set realistic expectations for restoration: knowing how sediment naturally accumulates, and how fast, informs everything from habitat design to flood management.
The cores we pulled this week are just the beginning. Once the lab results come back, we hope we’ll have a much clearer picture of what this landscape has been doing over the past century — and what we might expect from it in the years ahead.
Cameron Baxley is Riverkeeper at Apalachicola Riverkeeper.
She can be reached at [email protected]