Evidence of the past

This photo was taken near the mouth of the Eel River last week. The redwood stump is huge, the smaller, left edge is more than six feet high. It's standing in the midst of a large open area... there's a bit of coastal terrace prairie visible in the foreground, a shallow tidal marsh with pickleweed grading into invasive Spartina beyond that, and coastal dunes just visible in the background. The river is off to the right, perhaps a quarter-mile away.

We know the stump has been there a long time, and it's highly weathered. It's possible that it was deposited here during the 1964 floods which inundated most of the estuary. Redwood tends to occur a few miles inland here, so it  was probably swept down the river first from somewhere upstream.

It's a good reminder of the power of  ecological processes, in this case the floods which periodically occur on the Eel. We can restore or otherwise manipulate to whatever degree, but it's important to remember that someday the waters will once again rise, and as a result some locations will change profoundly as a result of scour or sediment deposition.

flatwoods

Another photo of Ryerson Woods (Lake County, IL) from last weekend. This one gives a better look at the trailside area where a shallow ditch was filled to restore hydrology.

Northern flatwoods are an unusual community on claypan... in this case a dense, yellowish clay just a few inches below the surface... characterized by stunted oaks including swamp white oak, various shrubs, and a herbaceous layer which includes several uncommon sedges. In late winter and spring it's very wet with numerous small vernal ponds which support a diverse amphibian community, and in late summer and fall conditions are typically very dry.

prairie and marsh

Prairie Wolf Slough in Highland Park, Illinois was agricultural land just a few decades ago. The Lake County Forest Preserve District and several project partners restored the site, mostly prairie with areas of shallow seasonal marsh. The marsh is visible in the left background of the photo, dominated by cattails.

The site is an island in suburbia. It's right next to a shopping mall, which at least makes it easy to grab a cup of coffee before walking the trails. On a sunny day shiny corporate office buildings can be seen gleaming in the far distance, much more subdued on the rainy day of the photo. To the east is an upscale residential neighborhood, to the north a four-lane highway. Yet the site looks pretty good, and supports healthy populations of western chorus frogs and northern leopard frogs. It's a good example of a restoration from bare ground, seeding the prairie back, and plugging ditches or breaking tiles to bring back wetlands, and then managing intensively to keep invasives in check. The site sees low-level but constant trail use, with a small parking area to make access easy.

Although I had very little to do with this one... a half-day baseline amphibian survey when the site was recently abandoned ag land in the late 1980s, and some backup for a grad student monitoring frogs post-restoration, about 15 years ago, I like to stop in every now and then simply because it's so easy to do, and on the way to other sites where I've spent much more time.

Rattlesnake master (Eryngium yuccifolium), the flowers long past bloom, against rain clouds; taken on Saturday at Prairie Wolf Slough, Highland Park IL

Ryerson Woods

This morning I went for a walk in light rain at Ryerson Woods, in the far north suburbs of Chicago. It's a 550-acre state nature preserve with examples of mesic forest, dry-mesic woodland, and northern flatwoods. Ryerson has special significance for several reasons; It's where I began my journey in restoration as a volunteer in the spring of 1983, it's where I conducted several years of quantitative research on amphibians, and later, in the late 1990s, I contributed to a hydrologic restoration design.

Today I visited one of those restoration sites. The photo above doesn't look like much, as is typical of northern flatwoods sites. Lots of stunted oaks and shrubs, a lot of detail for the eye to take in all at once, not a lot of individual features that stand out.

There are a few things to notice, though. The first is one that isn't there: The shallow ditch once present is gone. It would have been in the foreground, and it drained the entire area. Then, there's the hydrology indicators, the vegetation characteristic of seasonally wet areas, the buttressed roots of the trees, the barely visible water marks. In the spring, this entire area holds at least six inches of water. There's the fire scar on the base of the tree, evidence of prescribed burns. Finally, there's the dense carpet of herbaceous vegetation. It's denser than I remember, and the mid-level canopy is more open.

Overall the site looks good. I'll want to return in springtime, when it's wet, but my visit today suggests a healthier community than last time I saw this place.

In my opinion flatwoods communities were once more open than this, so hopefully this is an intermediate step along the restoration pathway. It seems to be a good beginning.

SER 4.1

The directions for the future part is going to take a little more thought. Fittingly, the closing plenary was a panel of four grad students, and ironically I missed most of it because I was intercepted in the hall by another student seeking career advice... one who seemed to be worth the time and effort.

As for the conference, there is so much to sift through, four days of ideas. The hot themes like novel ecosystems and resiliency, well certainly I'm going to want to follow those especially since so many people will be working on them, only two months ago they were a minor part of a conference and now they are everywhere. So the advances in thinking may be rapid. Yet at the same time, many good minds are already engaged on those concepts. All I really need to do is understand and sift the viewpoints and apply as necessary.

At the moment I'm more interested in continuing to balance science and intuition and policy, to seek out paths less traveled. To move forward though, I may take one more step into the past by visiting one or two of my old research and restoration sites while I'm in the Midwest. An opportunity to reflect while not swept up in a busy conference agenda, with time to think, time to let connections happen.

I saw a number of old friends this week, and made a few new ones, and certainly learned a few things. That counts as a success.

SER 4.0

The theme of the event is "Reflections on the Past, Directions for the Future." This morning I've had a little of both.

One of the plenary speakers early today was Laurel Ross, who I've known since about 1985. Her talk was essentially an overview of the Chicago region restoration community, and especially the volunteers. I began as a volunteer in 1983, something that led a few years later to my current career. It was important to see this very special time and place shared with so many people today, from so many places. So much happened in those early days of Chicago restoration, so many experiences that shaped so many of us.

Later I heard a talk by someone I hadn't seen in 18 years. While the subject wasn't really related in any direct way to what I'm doing now, that may have been even better; it became an opportunity to learn more about an ecosystem I've spent only a few days in. More importantly, it was an opportunity to learn what someone known in a moment of my past has been up to since what seems in human terms to have been a long time ago.

SER 3.1

This afternoon was a little fragmented, because I had a short notice meeting at Wisconsin DNR which is located just a few blocks from the conference venue. It was a preliminary meeting to discuss Hine's emerald dragonfly, and only took about 20 minutes but it did result in missing the first bit of the afternoon talks. I did get to hear about forest butterflies and extreme disturbance events at restoration sites.

At 4:00 I presented my own paper, and then (of course) remained in that room for the remainder of the time block event though I would ordinarily have sought out some other papers. After the talks were done for the day I had a series of very interesting conversations in the hallway with a few folks from The Nature Conservancy, a consultant from Texas, and a few others.

It was a shorter and easier day than yesterday. I'm about to look through tomorrow's program and get a sense of what to expect.

I should perhaps mention that last night's poster session included some very solid presentations, with the added bonus of a conversation with a former colleague at another consulting firm. I hadn't seen him in about seven years, so it was nice to catch up. After that a few of us walked over to downtown for dinner, which ultimately made for a late night end to a very good day.

SER 3.0

 I wasn't able to get into the late morning session on the relevance (or not) of reference sites, it was overflowing from the too-small room and would have been quite unpleasant even if there had been any tiny bit of space to squeeze into. Someone seriously underestimated the crowd when selecting session rooms. Apparently a lot of us will need to go back and read the abstracts.

The relevance of the topic should be obvious; at an event where we're talking a lot about novel ecosystems and climate change, is a reference site a reasonable analog of what we want to restore? Since there are few if any truly pristine reference sites left, we're working with best remaining examples, and some of those aren't very good. Choosing a site is important, yet there are few guidelines on what constitutes a suitable reference site. As with much else, a lot depends on the experience and the insight of the person making the choice.

So instead I went down the hall to a session on the post-industrial landscape, in a vast lecture hall sparsely populated by about 20 people. There, I heard a fascinating talk keyed from Nietzsche and including among other things some fascinating photos of the Duisburg Nord landscape park. This flowed into a postmodernist look at the landscape. The speakers were Euro and with a dramatically different sense of the landscape than what we Americans are accustomed to.

SER 2.01

Debbie Maurer's talk this afternoon looked at several oak woodland sites in southeastern Lake County, Illinois. Much of my early amphibian research was done at these sites so they're of considerable interest to me; I also had some limited involvement in the early days of restoration at those sites, ranging from monitoring amphibian response to buckthorn clearing at MacArthur Woods, a USEPA-funded study of amphibian/groundlayer vegetation relationships at several sites, and some preliminary restoration design in northern flatwoods at Ryerson Woods.

Lake County Forest Preserve District has long been out on the leading edge of woodland restoration, so it was good to hear that the tradition continues. They're actually thinning trees on test plots now in hopes of identifying the best way to enhance recruitment of new oaks. This ties directly into some things I've learned in northern California recently; but that's another post, sometime after the conference is over.

SER 2.0

Day two. It began slowly, various talks of moderate interest.

At 11:30, that all changed. Jody Bluhm presented a paper titled "Samish traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom." Much of it was a video providing background and a brief description of restoration activities, including estuary restoration, on Cypress Island in Puget Sound.

There is much to be learned from traditional wisdom. I'll share two special moments from that video. An elder spoke of her childhood, spoke of the ocean breathing... so much more eloquent, holding so much more meaning than our comparatively sterile modern technical descriptions.  Then, a tribal leader spoke of her ancestors, seven generations ago at the time of first European contact... and of the importance of thinking seven generations ahead.

This, at an event where most of us are thinking seven minutes ahead to which paper to dash to next, and that's long-term thinking compared to the general population.

Perhaps it's time to once again think seven generations ahead.

SER 1.2

More discussion of novel ecosystems:

Novel ecosystems = new configurations of species which arise as a result of anthropogenic influence; they do not require human management to maintain.
I had some immediate questions after the early talks.  These did not account for temporal variation. Are currently recognized novel ecosystems stable? For example, areas of the Midwest which were dominated by Eurasian buckthorn in the 1970s are now overtopped by cottonwoods, which are in turn relatively short-lived. In another 80 years, they will be something else. These are relatively unstable, at least for now. They have not had time to find an equilibrium.

Some of the later talks were much better, leading me to believe that the validity of this concept still depends a lot on the person and the definition being used. For example Joe Berg tied it to east coast stream restoration in what I thought was a very meaningful way.

Then came a reminder that this really is a world conference. I just heard an excellent estuary restoration talk by a South African, and am currently listening to a fellow from Beijing.

The best talks are very good. As always, others are too narrow spatially, temporally, or both, or just too rigid. The good ones make it all worthwhile.

SER 1.1

The SER event is being held at Monona Terrace, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s but not built until 1997. We just had lunch in the rooftop garden looking out over Lake Monona.

A session titled "Novel and Hybrid Ecosystems: Expanding the Restoration Paradigm" is just beginning and is sure to be thought provoking. More on that in a little while.

SER 2013

I'm at the Society for Ecological Restoration 5th World Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. Only halfway through the first morning, I'm of course still forming impressions; what's certain is that there are a lot of people here, reportedly over 1,200 people from 52 countries. There are 13 concurrent sessions and lots of good papers, it's going to be tough to choose.

The plenary kicked off with a diverse and upbeat talk by Paul Hawken, much too diverse to easily summarize here but I think it set a good tone for the event.

Not long after that, someone made the first mention of one of the key tensions in restoration ecology: The role, and the validity (or danger) of the novel ecosystem concept. I suspect more writings on that hot topic will follow.