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.