Cross-country skiing/snow shoeing on News Year's Day

Jim and Marci Hess will be hosting a cross-country skiing/snowshoeing event at Pleasant Valley Conservancy on New Year's Day, from noon to 4 PM. The cabin will be open and warm, and there will be light refreshments.

For further details, call the Hess's at 288-8662.

Off to Phoenix and the Southwest

There will be a hiatus in these posts while Kathie and I travel to Phoenix to have Christmas with our adult children.

But we'll be doing a little "business" on this Phoenix trip as we intend to visit some interesting oak savanna areas in mountain ranges on the Arizona/New Mexico/Old Mexico border. This is an area called the "Sky Islands", where mountain ranges shoot up from very dry desert. As the tourist brochures say: "Lush mountain islands float above desert seas..." Mountain ranges such as the Chiricahuas, Dragoons, Pinalenos, Peloncillos, and Tumacacori's, represent about one-fourth of more than forty Sky Islands that make up the region.

There has been considerable research in recent years on the use of prescribed fire to manage these savanna areas. Hopefully, we will be able to see some of the burn units. The species of oaks are completely different than what we have in the Midwest. The principal oak is gambel oak (Quercus gambelli), which is considered the "white oak" of the southwest.

Constructing a boardwalk

One of our major winter/spring projects is the construction of a boardwalk that will permit access across our wetland to the creek. The goal here is to have access to the wetland and creek, so that we can carry out restoration work on the wetland. At the same time, we will be able to monitor changes in the flora and fauna.

The boardwalk is being constructed in units that will lie atop 5-foot sections of used utility poles (donated by Madison Gas and Electric). Each unit of pressure-treated wood is 10 feet long and the deck boards are 3 feet long X 6 inches wide. The design, created by Jim Hess, is simple and easy for non-skilled workers to construct. All 20 units needed for the complete boardwalk have been constructed in the past two days.

The first photo shows the initial layout of a unit. The 10 foot long "stringers" standing on end are laid into spacer templates at both ends. These hold the stringers at the proper distance until the deck boards are attached.



The second photo shows the early stage in the installation of the deck boards. A thin spacer board is placed between each deck board, and another spacer is used on each side to ensure that the unit remains straight and true during construction. Self-threading screws are used, which penetrate the screw holes and into the side grain of the stringers. As the deck boards are fastened, the unit begins to take shape. When about half the deck boards are fastened, the templates are removed.








The third photo shows screw holes being drilled in the deck boards. These holes were found to be necessary to keep the deck boards from splitting.


The next photo shows a unit almost completed. We found that a second unit could be built on top of the first unit, up to a stack of six units. A simple design involving alternating light- and dark-colored boards is being created.


The final photos show several completed units, being stored outside in the snow. In addition to Susan, Marci, and Amanda (shown here), the construction crew included Jim Hess, Denny Connor, and Kathie and Tom Brock.


The boardwalk will be installed in the marsh as soon as conditions are suitable (absence of snow; hard surface). The units will be trucked to the starting point and laid end to end across the sedge meadow. Each unit will be fastened on each side to the next unit by two 2 foot connector pieces, using 1/2" bolts. The connection was designed so that the boardwalk units can shift, but the whole boardwalk will remain intact. Twenty units are needed to go from dry ground to the creek edge. A small bridge (already built) crosses a small, permanently flowing rivulet.

Installation of the boardwalk will require the help of a group of volunteers. Keep posted for further information.

Fire in Eastern Oak Forests conference

For the past decade the U.S. Forest Service has been sponsoring conferences on fire in eastern oak forests. The last conference was held in Carbondale, IL on 20-22 May 2008, and the proceedings are now available. Those interested in oak savanna restoration should find this publication interesting. It can be downloaded (PDF) or a print version can be obtained free by mail.

The proceedings contains full-length text of 10 papers plus 12 abstracts of posters. Over 200 people attended. Although I have not attended any of these conferences, I have been following them carefully because there is so much new information coming out on fire in oak forests.

Prescribed fire is now being used extensively in eastern oak forests, from New England to the Southern Appalachians and across the whole Midwest, all the way to Missouri and Arkansas. A lot of the recent activity has been brought about because the Forest Service and other agencies, as well as private landowners, have become aware of the great importance of fire as a management tool.

Although in Wisconsin we tend to think of fire's role in oak savanna management, throughout the eastern U.S. it also plays a major role in management of many other kinds of oak forests.

Here are a few of the topics in the 3rd proceedings:
Effect of fire on oak regeneration
Effect of oak canopy cover and fire on ground layer vegetation in oak woodlands and savannas
Fire and the endangered Indiana bat
Assessment of the accuracy of computer models for predicting fire behavior in oak forests
Control of smoke in eastern oak forest landscapes
Use of fire to restore oak ecosystems

Posters deal with fire history, oak regeneration, effect of fire on maples, role of fire in forest management, and many other topics.

The link below is to the web site of the Northern Research Station of the U.S. Forest Service , which is in Pennsylvania. They have lots of other publications available for download or for distribution in printed form. Among those I found especially interesting was a Photo guide for estimating risk to hardwood trees during prescribed burning operations in eastern oak forests which dealt not only with oaks, but with other tree species found in eastern oak forests.

Proceedings 3rd Fire in Eastern Oak Forests

Invasive Plants Association of Wisconsin (IPAW)

The latest edition of Plants out of Place (the newsletter of IPAW) just arrived, reminding me of how important this organization has become in Wisconsin. (IPAW is listed as one of the "success stories" of the USDA-NRCS.)

This nonprofit organization arose out of a conference held in Eau Claire in early March 2001. At the organizational meeting, I agreed to be the Treasurer and to act as the incorporator. We had many charter members who gave us checks at the meeting, thus giving us seed money that could be used to cover the initial work of getting the organization going.

After returning to Madison, I took care of the incorporation paper work at the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions (incorporated March 8, 2001), set up the post office box, and established a business checking account at U.S. Bank. The initial board of directors put together the bylaws and budget and I prepared the application to the IRS for nonprofit status. Within a year we had over 100 members, and the organization has continued to grow since.

IPAW was the brainchild of Kelly Kearns of the Wisconsin DNR, and those who played major roles in the early stages of IPAW (some are still active) were Dan Undersander (UW-Madison) President, Nancy Braker (TNC) Secretary, Rolf Utegaard (Eau Claire County) Vice President, and Jim Reinartz (UW-Milwaukee) Newsletter editor.

The current president is Jerry Doll (retired weed specialist for UW-Extension), and treasurer is Tom Boos (Forestry Invasive Plants Coordinator for the DNR). Amy Staffen took over as Secretary when Nancy Braker left the state. Rolf and Jim still continue in their important roles. The current board has 13 members, well distributed across the state.

In addition to my work as Treasurer, I did a lot of work on the web site, bringing in Martha Vomastic as webmaster and writing quite a bit of the early material. Martha continues to serve as webmaster and lots of people have contributed material. It is one of the most useful web sites for those interested in invasive plants of the Upper Midwest.

Since its founding, IPAW has held almost yearly conferences, which have been well attended. The last one, in February of 2009, had over 300 attendees, many of whom had to brave a late winter snow storm to reach the site on the east side of Madison.

For those involved in invasive plants (and what restoration ecologist isn't?), membership in IPAW is strongly recommended. The newsletter itself is worth the price of membership. Among other items in the new issue are incisive articles on Japanese hops, Japanese hedge parsley, and wild chervil, three emerging problem weeds. Also, a concise research article on use of herbicides to manage garlic mustard.

In addition to the important role IPAW is playing locally it also participates extensively in the Midwest Invasive Plant Network, which covers the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Since our emerging weeds generally come from out of the state, associating with organizations from other states is very useful.

The membership dues are nominal, and you can handle the whole process digitally (via PayPal) or download an application form and send in a check by mail.

Big snow: out of work for a while!

I'm not sure whether it is global warming or some wild gyration of the earth (butterfly effect, perhaps?), but it does seem that our winters are getting snowier. We've had record snows the past two years, and now we have a third record year. I understand that last night/today's snow was a record for Madison. It was certainly heavy to shovel!

The photo above was taken from my living room window. I'm not inclined to go to Pleasant Valley Conservancy until things "settle down" a bit. Hopefully, this heavy snow will not prune too many big trees, although we lost several branches here at home.

A snow like this brings a certain finality to our buckthorn control work, since you can't basal bark with that much snow around the stems. In fact, unless we get a real warm spell, we may be out of business for quite a while. Too bad, because winter is a good time of year to deal with buckthorn.

Prairie/savannas: restoration or reconstruction?

We generally use the term "restoration" to refer to what we are doing. Sometimes the noun is modified into "ecological restoration".

Sometimes the word "reconstruction" is used instead of "restoration". The Minnesota DNR, which publishes a nice handbook on prairie restoration, makes this distinction: reconstruction refers to establishing native plants on a site that has been completely degraded, so that there are no prairie plants left. This site might have once been a prairie, but if so, it was a long time ago, and agriculture or forestry has destroyed it.

Restoration, on the other hand, refers to starting with an existing remnant, a piece of land on which native plants still remain, although likely in a degraded condition. Restoration involves "improving" the native plant community, using techniques such as invasive plant removal, reintroduction of fire, and planting seeds or seedlings to supplement the existing species. The end results in both reconstruction and restoration might be the same, although in most cases it takes a lot less time to restore than to reconstruct.

Although this distinction may seem a bit pedantic, since the goals are similar, the techniques are usually quite different.

At Pleasant Valley Conservancy, we have done both reconstruction and restoration.

Reconstruction: The four ag fields (Toby's, Pocket, Valley, and Ridge Prairies, now in the Conservation Reserve Program) had been in agriculture so long that there was nothing "good" left. The vegetation was principally smooth brome grass, with impressive amounts of invasive weeds including annual weeds, as well as such perennials or biennials as birds foot trefoil, ox-eye daisy, Queen Anne's lace, sweet clover, and wild parsnip. Two other "fields", the Crane Prairie and East Basin, had apparently never been plowed, but through the years had become heavily wooded. Again, the work was reconstruction, but starting with chain saws. In both cases, the final step before planting involved heavy applications of glyphosate herbicide to kill all existing plants.

Restoration: On the other hand, the south-facing slope and all of the savanna areas at Pleasant Valley Conservancy were restored rather than reconstructed. Considerable chain saw work was required, to remove both invasive shrubs and trees. However, many "good" native plants were present and not only thrived, but increased greatly after the woody invaders were removed. Since years of degradation had led to an impoverished native flora, many new species were introduced by hand planting, a technique called "interseeding".

One nice thing about the restoration work is that many surprises took place. Species that we did not know were present arose after clearing and burning, some of them quite rare. On the other hand, no surpise species occurred in the reconstructed prairies. What we planted was what we got, and nothing else.

The best manual on restoration techniques is "The Tallgrass Restoration Handbook" by Stephen Packard and Cornelia Mutel, published in 1997 by the Island Press, Washington, D.C.