University Place

Legacy Trees and the Prairie Savanna Project

– Thank you, everybody, for coming to my presentation today about the Heritage Oak Project.

My name’s Matt Noone, and I work for the Capital Area Regional Planning Commission, and I’m also with the Dane County Tree Board.

So this is gonna be a presentation about an inventory of all the oldest oaks that we have here in Dane County.

These trees have been on our landscape before America was America.

Most of these trees we estimate to be well over 200 years old.

So this has also been a partnership with the Wisconsin DNR and the State Cartography Office as well.

So here are two Heritage Oaks; this is in Warner Park.

So quickly I realized the key to success of this project is involving as many kids as we can of all ages, and so far, we’ve probably involved several hundred children at this point in this project, amongst many other adults as well.

So here’s a brief outline.

I’m gonna talk about why we’re talking about oaks in the first place here.

Oaks are the dominant historical vegetation.

They’re a long-lived species.

They’re the only tree that’s gonna live up to 200 years in this area typically, and they’re also very important for wildlife.

So then I’ll talk about the original Heritage Oak Project, which began in 1976.

It was updated in 2001 by the Tree Board and Bruce Allison.

And then in these last two years, we’ve revisited that original inventory and updated it a third time.

And then finally, I’m gonna talk about this side project that kind of spurred off of this Heritage Oak Project, where we’re actually collecting acorns from these Heritage Trees, these 200-year-old trees, and growing them in several different locations.

So the National Wildlife Federation says oak species are a keystone species for wildlife.

There’s over 436 species of caterpillars that are found in the canopies of oak.

But I think more importantly, there’s a cultural connection to some of these old trees, something that’s, like, linking humans to the landscape.

Often whenever there’s one of these big Heritage Trees that falls down, it ends up in the news.

So here are a couple examples.

And now I’ll tell you a little bit about the red oak group and the white oak group, and some of the key differences.

So red oaks, they have acorns that take two years to mature and the acorns germinate in the spring, whereas white oaks, their acorns only take one year to mature and they germinate in the fall.

So the red oaks, they have pointed leaf lobes.

The white oaks have rounded leaf lobes.

All of species in the red oak family, or all the species in the white oak family, they all readily hybridize within their group, so it can make it difficult to differentiate some of the different species at times.

And then the red oaks, they typically grow faster than the white oak family and they also don’t live quite as long.

And so there’s a lot of variety amongst or within a species, and also a lot of variety in species across its distribution.

And so we’re talking about Heritage Trees here.

So that’s referring to a tree that’s at least 200 years old.

So 11-foot circumference tree for a red oak family, ’cause they grow faster, is what we consider a Heritage Tree.

And then for a white oak family, we’re using a 10-foot circumference to qualify a Heritage Tree.

And just to give you an example, so if we’re thinking about diameter, that would be about a 38-inch diameter for a tree would represent a 10-foot circumference.

So now I’m gonna talk a little bit about the Dane County landscape prior to European-American arrival.

So prior to settlement, before the government could settle Dane County, the land had to be surveyed.

So without the survey, the land couldn’t be distributed to the railroad companies, timber barons, settlers, farmers, that type of thing.

So with this survey that began in 1832 and ended in 1835, there were detailed land surveyor notes about the landscape, and then they also had these sketch maps here.

And between the sketch maps and the land surveyor notes, you can really depict the general landscape transitions.

And more importantly, there’s also these witness trees.

So surveyors traverse the landscape in quarter-section grid patterns and they establish the monuments.

And every time they established a monument, you had to have one to three witness trees to relocate that monument.

So when you have these witness trees, the diameter of the tree, the species was recorded in addition to the distance and the azimuth back to that monument to help you relocate it.

So through the witness tree data, it can really give us a picture of what the landscape looked like at the time prior to European-American settlement.

And so at this time, the landscape was almost completely dominated by an oak savanna or oak gap landscape, or just very few trees per acre.

And so prior to European-American arrival, there was frequent fires.

But after settlement, the fire suppression and a lot of ag development had dramatically changed the forest here forever.

So these are the witness trees in 1834.

So 90% of the over 7,600 witness trees were oak species.

So as you could see, a very dominant oak.

Where there are no witness trees in these areas, that’s because there were prairie, there was no trees there whatsoever.

This is a map of all the bur oak witness trees.

So that constituted 63% of all the witness trees in Dane County.

And then 20% of all the witness trees were white oak, and 14% of the trees were black oak or red oak.

So as you can see, all three of the dominant species here are found pretty much throughout the landscape.

And this is looking at a density trees-per-acre map.

And you can see that most of Dane County had less than 15 trees per acre.

But, like, one thing to note, some of these trees that are grown in the open areas, they can have quite large canopies, almost like a quarter-acre canopy for one large bur oak.

These are the white oaks that you can find in Wisconsin.

So the white oak, swamp white oak is much less commonly found, bur oak, and then chinkapin oak you can find out on the Mississippi Bluffs.

Here are the red oaks, northern pin oak, red oak, and black oak.

And then there’s also some historical reports that shingle oak was in Wisconsin.

So that could have been an example of a local extinction.

And now I’ll talk about the second part of my project, the Heritage Oak Project itself.

So this is a 50-year-old project that actually began in 1975.

And so, again, it’s a collaboration between the Tree Board, CARPC, State Cartographer’s Office, but it’s also a collaboration between anyone and everyone because it’s a citizen scientist crowdsource project.

Anybody can contribute to it and add to it.

So this is Walter Scott.

He’s in the Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame.

He’s the one that initiated the original Heritage Oak Survey.

So I’ll just read a quote for you from him.

“Trees are a living heritage that we have in common “with Black Hawk, Abraham Lincoln, and the early explorers “and leaders of our nation and state.

“Their beauty, ecological value, “and utility to our forefathers will reach into the future of our descendants.”

So in 1975, there was a class, a history class in Spring Harbor.

They came to Walter Scott and they asked him if there were any trees across the landscape that were present when Black Hawk retreated through the isthmus in 1832.

And so that’s kind of like what set Walter Scott off.

He did an inventory of all the trees in Spring Harbor with the students.

But then in 1976, along the same kind of lines, he extended that survey to look just at oak trees within an eight-mile radius of the capitol.

And so that was the original Heritage Oak Project.

One more quote from Walter Scott.

So this is a article from The Cap Times, 1976.

“How many can we preserve for the tricentennial in 2076?

“This would require a determined effort “to keep them all alive and well “with a willingness to allow a place for them “in an environment rapidly filling with asphalt and concrete development.”

So this is a picture of the largest red oak in Wisconsin in 1976.

You can see it’s a fairly open canopy around it.

And here you can see that same exact tree in a closed-canopy environment in 2023.

So this is our web app here.

You can click on any tree and it will show you the picture, and it will list the measurements and all the different years that it’s been inventoried.

So as to date, we’ve had probably over 50 different citizen scientists to help contribute, add trees to this map, or verify some of the original existing trees.

So the black trees on this map, they represent trees that are no longer on the landscape from the original inventory.

So trees that have died.

The green are trees that are still on the landscape from the inventory, and we’ve verified that they’re alive.

And then the red trees are new trees that weren’t in the inventory that we’ve added.

And so to add a tree to the inventory, all you have to do is take a measurement, make sure that it’s large enough, that it’s estimated to be 200 years old, and take a picture of the tree.

So I used to help out finding the biggest trees in Oregon with the Champion Tree project there.

And so I learned from my friend out there that there’s a proper way to do your tree posing gaze, and then there’s a more fun tree posing gaze.

But it is good to have pictures of people next to the trees for scale.

So in the original inventory in 1976, there were 443 Heritage Trees identified.

By 2001, we found that there were 72% of those trees remaining.

And then by 2023, we saw that there was only 42% of those trees, those original Heritage Trees remaining.

We’ve also added 113 new trees to the inventory as well.

Here’s a distribution map of the species.

So you can see bur oaks, they’re kind of scattered distribution throughout the county, whereas the red oaks and the white oaks, they tend to be more closely aligned to water bodies.

And I don’t really see much of a pattern for trees that are no longer present.

So this is looking at the number of oaks in the inventory each year by species.

So you could see overall, 42% of the original trees are still in the landscape.

With the red oaks, there’s only 23% of the trees still in the landscape, but that’s not really too surprising to me because red oaks typically don’t live as long as the white oaks.

So not all these trees are lost due to development.

Some of them is just natural cause of death.

Just a different way to look at the chart.

It shows you how many trees were lost each time period by species and how many trees were added.

So we’ve had a lot of interest in this Heritage Tree Project for quite some time, and a lot of people have been contacting me, they want to be kept up to date.

So we kind of created this little newsletter to keep people involved that want to know about the project.

So that’s what this here is.

It’s our newsletter called “Dispatches from the Living Artifacts.”

So this is the third part of the presentation.

So this is where we’re gonna get into growing the trees and planting the trees.

And I just have a little quote here from the newsletter just to kind of paint the picture of what it’s like to try to collect some of these acorns.

So, “On the afternoon of August 20, 2022, “the car was loaded up with wagons, empty garbage cans, “tarps, five-gallon buckets, “and most importantly, the bagging-up machine.

“We headed out to the Yahara Hills Golf Course, “where a golf cart was waiting, ready to assist us “with our acorn collection.

“My 4-year-old son and I had been searching “for Heritage Oak Trees for the previous several months, “always looking for trees, sometimes with binoculars, “that would have a bumper crop of acorns in the fall, “only to be disappointed time and time again.

“In fact, we were barely able to find any oak trees with acorns in Dane County.”

So this was a state champion swamp white oak on UW campus.

I’ve nominated this one, but it was only the champion for about two to three weeks before someone found a bigger one in Waukesha.

But this is just a picture of the State Cartographer Office where it’s showing them the proper way to measure a tree.

So this is the Bag-A-Nut machine.

It kind of works like a driving range.

Sometimes they have those machines with all the little fingers that you push and roll over the golf balls, it grabs a golf ball and spits it back out into the hopper.

So it’s the same kind of idea basically.

And then my last quote from Walter Scott.

“From the finest and best oaks, wise persons will secure acorns for planting.”

So most of the acorns that we collected, we’ve collected over 200 acorns, or 200 gallons of acorns from these Heritage Trees.

Most of them ended up going to the DNR nursery and they’re growing them out in Boscobel, and they require that the tree be of natural origin.

So that means that they wanna make sure that the tree has locally-adapted genetics to the climate and the landscape.

And the only way that you can be sure of that is that the tree is an old, old tree that has been around before Wisconsin was Wisconsin, basically.

So I’ll talk to you about some of the challenges when it comes to collecting and growing and storing acorns.

So first, as I said before, finding a Heritage Oak with an adequate mast is a lot more tricky than you think.

Just in the last two years I’ve been doing this, I’ve probably only found four trees that had a acorn mast that was worth collecting.

And that’s after searching all summer and keeping an eye out on this.

And then the second is beating the rodents and the birds to the acorns.

It’s probably the most challenging part.

Then you have to store the acorns somewhere cool ’cause it’s summertime.

And sometimes, you can end up collecting a lot of acorns and none of them are even viable too.

So we’ll talk about how to test for viability.

So back to the rodent-proofing, you know, I heard from other tree growers that it’s a big deal to rodent-proof your acorns and your little saplings.

And so I did.

But then I figured once the tree was 17 inches tall, that we were fine.

I didn’t have to worry about the rodents anymore.

But the rodents would still come and they’d rip out the tree, they’d throw it on the ground just for the acorn that’s still attached to it, providing nutrients to the tree.

So I thought, you know, this is a live trap.

I thought if I could maybe remove one or two of these chipmunks from my yard, I wouldn’t have to worry about them doing this anymore.

But after, like, three or four weeks of catching two chipmunks every single day, I realized that there’s an unlimited supply of chipmunks and rodents in an urban environment.

So there’s nothing you can do about that.

[laughs] Or, well, there is something.

These are the rodent-proof cages I then started building.

So it’s, like, quarter-inch hardware cloth, the top removes, and it gives the trees enough room to grow for two years.

So each one of these cages holds about 200 tree pots.

So then there’s the float test.

Once you collect all your acorns, then you want to float them and test for viability.

So if they float, they’re no good.

You can compost them.

But the ones that sink, those are the viable acorns, the ones that you want to keep.

And sometimes, you might end up collecting 20 gallons of acorns and find out that every single one of ’em floats too.

So here’s an example.

I said that the white oak, they germinate in the fall, and you can see, they chewed out that root basically right away.

These ones were actually germinating on the tree.

They can even do that in the right conditions.

So once they start putting out that root, you basically have to store ’em, put them in cold storage right away, or else the root can desiccate.

So here are the storage, you keep ’em in the refrigerator.

Another way to test your acorns, if you wanna just do a sample of some of the acorns you’re gonna collect, you could just cut ’em in half.

If they’re, like, brown or buggy or kind of soft, then they’re no good.

But if they’re this white or cream color, then they’re worth keeping.

So now we started growing these acorns in a few different locations in Madison.

This is at UW Extension; this is my backyard.

We’ve grown them in a couple other places, as you’ll see.

So this is a acorn collection at St. Dennis.

These are some bur oak Heritage Oaks in 2023.

Here we are collecting at Schenk Elementary.

So we didn’t even need the Bag-A-Nut machine for this.

We just got the snow shovels and brooms and filled up our buckets in no time at all.

So, yeah, we found all these acorns from a Heritage Tree at Schenk.

So I ended up calling the principal and asking her if she’d be interested in growing some of these trees with the Dane County Tree Board on her property.

So she was really excited about it.

And so we ended up getting some of the kindergartner classes to come out there.

And first we took ’em to the tree and we told ’em, you know, “Why trees are important,” you know, “Tell us the different parts of the tree, the roots, the leaves.”

Then we asked them where acorns come from, and they say China or Mexico.

[laughs] And so then after we take ’em to the tree, then we bring ’em back to where the tree cage is in their garden area and we give them the pot, we give ’em a seed, and they put their popsicle stick in there and they go put it in the tree cage.

So the next week, we did another tree planting with Nuestro Mundo.

So here we had, like, a bunch of different education stations.

So this is the Baby Oak Education Station.

So before it’s even become a tree.

So we have the kids sit down and we do the same thing.

We say, “Why are trees important?”

and talk to the kids about what we’re gonna do that day.

And then we give them their tree pot, they fill it up with soil.

Then they come to me, I’ll give them two acorns, they put two acorns in the pot, and then they bring the pot over to my friend Brian here in the tree cage, and they say, “Grow, tree, grow.”

[laughs] And after that, the kids go to a different workstation with a different teacher, a juvenile oak.

They sit under the tree, it’s about 20 years old or something like that, and we read them a book.

And then we take them to their Heritage Oak on their campus as the last tree.

And this particular event was really successful ’cause right after, the school was getting out, basically, right after the kids cycled through the workstations.

And so all the families that were coming by to pick up their kids, they’d all come and plant a few trees as well.

And then probably the biggest success of this project is our partnership with the DNR nursery.

So most of the acorns that we collected, we sent to DNR, and this is from this June, or I think June.

And now currently we’re growing over 10,000 bur oaks in Boscobel, and over 11,000 red oaks in Boscobel.

So these are gonna be used for reforestation projects throughout the region.

And so we gave them another a hundred gallons this year, so in total, there’ll probably be like 40,000 trees that we’re growing with DNR.

So with that, I’ll just say what’s next.

We’re getting 300 trees to give away in April, Heritage Trees that we’re growing.

We want to continue to work with schools, and I would like to see tree growing projects with as many schools as possible.

There’s many people to thank for this project.

A lot of people have been involved, hundreds of kids, many, many other organizations as well.

With that said, how can you help?

I guess if you know of a Heritage Tree, feel free to add it to the inventory.

Or if you know of a school that’s interested in growing oaks on their property, you can let me know too.

So with that, thanks.

[audience applauding] – My name is Cindy Becker.

I work for the Southern Driftless Grasslands, which is a partnership that is coordinated through a number of agencies down in southwest Wisconsin.

I am housed at the Driftless Area Land Conservancy, which is a nonprofit organization out of Dodgeville.

And the reason why we are doing these two projects together is that when I first heard of Matt’s work in Dane County, I was immediately drawn to the fact that there is overlap in the work that we are trying to accomplish down in southwest Wisconsin.

And there are a lot of things that you’ll see as I give this talk where we have overlap, not only in the timeframe, but also in the kind of work that is going on.

So it’s very exciting to me.

We are currently embarking on what we call the Prairie Savanna Project.

And this is a project of a group, as I said earlier, called the Southern Driftless Grasslands.

The partnership is conservation agencies, educational organizations, land trusts, and landowners.

And I’m very excited that they’ve decided to embrace this project as one of its primary goals because I’ve been working in prairie and savanna remnants my whole life.

I started out in Missouri, where we call them glades, and then I got a chance to work in the Great Plains where there’s vast amounts of prairie left.

And I moved up here and I found on my own property, that I was stewarding at the time, a remnant, which I didn’t even know there were such things here in this area.

And so it really stirred for me.

For the last 15 years, I’ve been really searching and engaged in trying to find more ways to research and learn about these special places in our space.

And so at today’s talk, I wanna first talk about this region, particularly southwest Wisconsin and its human history.

And then what is actually a prairie remnant?

What is a savanna remnant?

And then finally, end with the Prairie Savanna Project.

So when you look at this space on this slide, you could really be anywhere.

You could be in the Dakotas, you could be in Nebraska, but this is actually a view scape from southwest Wisconsin actually called Mounds View Grasslands, which is located in Iowa County.

This is a region where prairie and savanna once blanketed this entire space.

And we are a part of the Driftless area.

We are down in the southern part of the Driftless area, which goes down into Iowa and over, well, actually down into Illinois and over into Iowa, is flatter and more broad, has a broader landscape than further north, where you have highly dissected hills.

So this area is a lot more conducive to this broad prairie landscape than you’d find up in the northern part of the Driftless area.

And this is actually, we call this, when we look at the 1880s, I’m sorry, the early 1800s map in terms of tribal territories, this is the home of the Ho-Chunk and the Potawatomi.

But when I look back further into the records, particularly using a wonderful website called nativelands.org, I find mention of the Sauk, the Fox, the Kickapoo, and Myaamia.

Many of these tribes I don’t know much about.

And so clearly there’s a lot that we have to learn, and I have to learn, about these people that the impact of these generations of people that lived on, traveled through, and managed this landscape.

And the one thing that comes to me over and over again is that this human history before European settlement, it is a history of fire.

And so this map that we have, you’ll see this referred to a lot when you have talks about prairie and savanna, and also looking at the historic vegetation type that covered this area prior to European settlement.

We use this map of vegetation of Wisconsin in the mid-1800s from Finley, which was put together in 1976.

And although this is small, I’m gonna highlight this one area, which is where I’m talking about.

When you look at the color codes, we have prairie, brush, oak, oak openings.

And again, going back to what Matt was saying about what he saw in Dane County by looking at those old maps, it is one in the same story.

As these travelers, we got this information, similar to what he was saying, is that as they went through, they had to take meticulous notes of what they were seeing.

And so it’s from that information that we can paint a picture of what the plant communities were prior to us, prior to settlement into the region.

And I just imagine that very detailed map that Matt showed of all the points that had the oaks of the different species, this flowery script is what that comes from.

So a lot of people have spent hours of time trying to go through this and make sense of it, but this is the way that we used to document this information.

So you’ll see B-oak is for black oak, BR-oak is for bur oak, bur oak, bur oak, bur and white oak, prairie.

This is, again, this was taken from southwest Dane County, so it’s very much connected to the work that Matt was showing earlier.

Many of these are probably on that legacy tree document.

And so oak and prairie habitats, they are created and maintained by fire.

And over the years, researchers from many different angles have formulated the frequency– have tried to formulate the frequency of fire in the region.

And this has required sleuthing into historical documents, whether they’re notes from early settlers who were in the area and they were scribing when the large fire came towards them and they had to, you know, find cover.

We have many different ways that we can see that from those early transcribed records.

But if we’re trying to actually look at the science of fire on the landscape, we look to the land itself.

And so researchers will go to places where they find these heritage or legacy trees, or where they find pockets of prairies still remaining, and they look for burn scars.

They look for trees that either are standing or are dead on the ground, and they take slices and they use very, you know, specific technology to actually identify the periodicity of those fires in the wood.

And they can use wood that’s buried in streams.

They actually also use charcoal sediment that’s buried in ponds or lakes.

And from that, they can put together a depiction or a history of the fire in the area.

We know that in southwest Wisconsin, they now say that fires existed every three to five years on average.

So when we think about today and where we are, it’s a big difference between what was and what is in maintaining these special places.

This is a picture of a property.

The landowners believe in fire, and they burn nearly annually for the last 20, 25 years.

And this picture was taken last year.

So you can see the openness of that land.

They have dry prairie, they have savanna, they have wet meadow, sedge meadow, wet-mesic prairie, and they’re all responding very favorably.

And as they do it, they’re seeing more and more of these native species come up, including a lot of rare and endangered species.

And so why did people burn?

You know, we would think that that would be stressful and not really something we’d wanna do.

You know, we think of running away from fire.

But when you think about life without a Walmart or a Trader Joe’s or, you know, those places that we can get food, these areas and, oh, it’s pretty washed out.

But these were really important spots, not only for food resources, but also I think about…

I think about dead, downed wood.

If you were trying to start a cooking fire, you wouldn’t be lugging over a large log over to your fire.

You’d be looking for small twigs.

And the only way they’d have that when they came back into an area was if there was dead wood on the ground that they could use.

So for that purpose, and then also for the new growth that brought in a lot of wildlife to the area.

And also species like this, this is a wild onion.

These were, you know, that new growth and those food sources and medicine were integral to their survival.

So any strategy they had for increasing abundance of what they needed, those were valued and utilized.

And here is a depiction of the cycle of a fire-dependent system.

We know that prairies are one of the rarest and most diverse ecosystems in the world.

These prairies are dominated by perennial grasses, and those are grasses that live multiple years and have more of a clump growth way of growing so that they allow for small micro-habitat spaces for small seeds to get into and grow in.

So it allows for a lot of diversity in a small area.

Grasses make up 50% to 95% of a prairie’s vegetation.

But within that, in those interstitial spaces, are a large variety of sedges and flowering plants.

And these prairies, you can find them on dry sites, you can find them on wet sites, rocky to sandy to silty clay, no matter the type.

So soil type or location.

The most important thing that we’ve realized over the years is that without fire or some other kind of periodic disturbance, they will just fill in with trees.

And so here’s, you know, again, this depiction of the time, pre-settlement, in terms of a map, and we know the way that these tribal, well, that tribal groups would utilize their land.

And after that, we started to think about, we came into the area in the 1830s for various reasons, some of those Matt mentioned earlier, and with that came a cessation of fire.

And it was replaced with the current working landscape that we live in today.

We have working lands, wonderful, amazing, productive farms, roads, and houses.

And yet what that has also meant is those large expanses of prairie have been reduced to these small pockets.

And these little tiny spaces that still harbor the diversity of those early prairies, we call them prairie remnants.

And they’re remnants of the past, that’s why we use that term.

However, I’d also advocate that we call them banks.

They’re prairie banks because they’re banks of diversity.

They’re banks of flowers, of diversity of insects and mammals and birds.

And so today, when you think about what is left, we have .01% left of that original vegetation alive today.

And they’re all found in these small spaces.

And instead of that being depressing, which there are times in my career that that is very depressing, I’ve decided to find hope, and find hope in the fact that these small pockets are embedded sometimes within larger grass landscapes.

And these small pockets do still hold that diversity.

And so for example, we have the federally-listed prairie bush clover can be found in these small remnants.

This is a species that is extremely hard to find and you have to have a trained eye for it, but it’s like a child finding candy when you do, if you’re [laughs] a plant geek like I am.

We have the rusty-patched bumble bee that utilizes these spaces.

And we have a species called the regal fritillary, which is state-listed.

And this particular butterfly needs these wide open spaces of grassland to survive, but it also has to have its host plant, which is a violet.

So without these remnants that have the violets and the open grass around it, it won’t survive.

So here’s just another example of a connection between a prairie-dependent insect that we need these to survive on the landscape.

And you can’t talk about this without talking about the beautiful monarch.

And all of the attention that’s been brought to it has done a lot to increase the amount of planted prairie on the landscape, which is really important.

But again, those planted prairies are nothing compared to the diversity that’s found in these remnants.

And with that said, here’s an example of a study that was done back in 2008.

So a little aged, but still is active in what it has.

This study, which was of 71 square meter plots, and a one square meter, if you think about it, is about three feet by three feet square.

So if you put that on the ground, you think of any place in your world around you that you can find 59 species, I don’t think we can.

It’s in these remnants that that still exists.

So the more that we can do to protect these, again, I’ll just be like a broken record.

We need to do it.

[laughs] And on the other side of the spectrum, part of this oak prairie continuum is oak savanna.

And a lot of us in, you know, we call this Midwest old-growth forests.

They’re characterized by this two-tier system where you have large spreading trees on the overstory, a lack of brush in the understory, and a diverse expanse of prairies and prairie grasses and flowers in the understory.

And the diversity here comes from the variety of light conditions that you find in these systems because you’ll have areas that are really dark and dense under the oak trees.

Plus you’ll have open spaces in between those trees where it’s bright and sunny.

So you have a variety of light conditions and environmental opportunity for different plants.

In some of the species that use this, this is a state species of concern.

This is called the redheaded woodpecker.

We also have the ornate box turtle.

Those particularly like sandy oak savannas.

And then the eastern pips– I’m gonna say it wrong, pipstrelle.

Pipistrelle, which is a little tiny bat that likes to live in the bark of the oaks and the hickory trees that are in these systems.

So I’m gonna move on to the project itself.

Two years ago, I was able to, I took the chance to attend a Natural Areas Conference field trip to western Minnesota.

And I tell you, Minnesota has a hands up on us on this stand because they already have in place what they call the Minnesota Prairie Bank Program.

And this, if you look at this map closely, and I’m hoping that you can see the important thing that I wanna point out, is that they’ve realized that as they mapped where the prairies were across the western part of their state, they began to develop corridors and ways that they could add in planted prairie to create insect migratory corridors for them, almost like pearls, so that they could travel.

And it put a seed in my head, “Why are we not doing this “where we have in a similar fashion the same kind of small remnants throughout our landscape?”

And so with that in my mind, I came back and I brought it to the partners.

And there have been many, many people studying and researching these prairies in our area, going back to the 1970s where Matt said that there was a push to identify the legacy trees in the Dane County area.

Around that same time, prairies became of utmost interest to a lot of ecologists in the, you know, across the state, but primarily in southwest Wisconsin.

And there was a push, and I have hand maps, we have all of these different ways that this information has been collected over the years.

Around that same time, a group called the Prairie Enthusiasts got together as a grassroots movement.

And that started with a small group of people that said, “We need to protect these prairies across this area.”

And it’s now turned into a four state, I think there are chapters in Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin that are active in the Prairie Enthusiasts today.

So if you look at this map, this is a combination of a number of different projects, some of them extensive in terms of the amount of time that people have been documenting these prairies, and others with a very intensive effort in 2010 that was done to identify where potential remnants could be.

And so we have this, all of those dots on that slide are places where we think there are prairies.

Many of them have been verified, but about 60% of them have not.

So where we have these, we think there are about 600 remnants across this land, but we really haven’t had an intense effort that we’re using the same information to document what they look like, what is their current condition, and also how we can restore, what is needed to restore them.

And as an example, here in Dane County, this is Perry Township, which is located in the southwest corner of Dane County.

All of those areas that are outlined in blue, some are very small, some are much larger.

Those are all the prairie and savanna remnants that we are trying to access.

Now, we have to realize that 97% of the land in southwest Wisconsin is private.

So in order to even get into Dane County, these greater than 250 remnants, that meant calling and contacting about 150 landowners.

And so we decided that we just were gonna try, and so we started with Dane County and we sent everyone this cool postcard.

“Your property could be hiding something special.”

And we thought for sure we were gonna get a lot of people writing back to us like, “Absolutely, come check it out,” you know, “Come to our land.”

And we did have a good turnout.

2023 was our inaugural launch.

We had a couple bumps and, you know, challenges in figuring out how to do this because we are asking people that we can get on their property.

That means some folks might have cattle out in the field that we have to collaborate with them to make sure that [laughs] we’re not in the same pasture with a bull, or they’re a little bit more private and they don’t want people on their property.

So we reached out and we had 22 landowners allow us access to their property.

And we were able, using a very standardized sheet that included input from the DNR and from the Prairie Enthusiasts and other colleagues, to grade their current condition and restoration potential.

And then with this, and also I reached out to all of the many contractors who work in the area who are passionate about prairie and savanna.

Many of those companies are here at this expo today.

With their input, we were able to update the status on over 70 remnants this year in Dane County.

Now, we have a lot more work we need to do just in Dane County, so I’m envisioning for us to get through the entire area that we want, it’s gonna be about a seven-year process, and that’s why we are hoping that we can get other people involved.

[laughs] And this information is not just so that we have this, you know, so we can be like, “Wow, you know, we can just tout how much is in this area.”

That’s not what this is about.

The goal of this project is very similar to the Minnesota Prairie Bank Program.

The more we know, the more we can advocate for cost-share to be brought in the area.

The more we can help landowners do the work that’s needed to keep those in good condition.

And that could include bringing roving crews into the area that sign up to work with landowners to burn their prairies or to do brush work.

Like, we have a lot of ideas that we’re thinking through to make this happen.

And all landowners that have allowed us access to their property, they receive a report and they also receive a follow-up so that we can talk to them about cost-share and options for restoration.

And we know this works because we’ve done a lot of work in other, you know, whether it’s savanna and prairie restoration, you know, with outside of this project vision, but also wetland habitat work, also helping people with their CRP plantings, which is conservation reserve programs, which are prairie plantings.

We know that when we visit with a landowner, they learn more, they get more engaged, and they want to do something ’cause, you know, information is priceless.

So we really hope that as we do more work with landowners as part of this project, we will also be able to initiate more work on these small remnants.

And so how people can help, we are going to set up a system so that you can report a prairie or savanna that you know, whether it’s along a roadside, whether it’s along a railroad line, that’s a really great place for these to show up.

You can have an assessment of a prairie or savanna remnant on your own land.

It’s a free service, and we want more and more people to use that.

You can invest in restoration through learning and doing.

There are a lot of groups out there who do this work and welcome your volunteer help.

This was given to me by the Prairie Enthusiasts of one of their work days, and here is the after-effect of that.

This is now set up to do some burning into, you know, moving forward.

And as a plug for fire and the Prescribed Fire Council, which is really advocating for this, we need to make good fire [laughs] across this landscape.

Let’s restore fire to the land and restore our natural heritage.

So there’s two organizations that are involved in this right now, and I hope to have more into the future.

In terms of people that you can be connected to to get that free site visit.

And the area that’s outlined in red, that’s where the Southern Driftless Grasslands is housed.

And so you’d be contacting me, and I’d be happy to come out and do a site visit on your property as well.

And that’s also shown in the Prairie Enthusiasts so that you can contact those, but you can also come, you know, give us a call and they’re one of our partners.

But here are all the other chapters for the Prairie Enthusiasts that they would welcome your call and would find a way to set up for you to have a visit so we can get that information and start talking about ways to manage your prairie.

And down here on the bottom are all of the partners that are involved in the Southern Driftless Grasslands partnership.

And I work for the Driftless Area Land Conservancy, so I’m gonna be at that booth, which is booth 303, and we have some more information there.

And also you can contact me at my email or also visit our website.

And with that, I say thank you very much for listening.

[audience applauding]