University Place

The UW-Madison Arboretum

– Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for the UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Brad Herrick from the UW-Madison Arboretum. He’s going to be here to talk about a legacy of research in ecological restoration at the Arb. For those of us who live here in the Madison area, it seems like the Arboretum has always been there, but it hasn’t. Once upon a time it was just land, and at one point it was a run-down farm. So it’s always a good idea to keep in mind some of the great things that are here are here because people took big risks and made big investments long ago and we enjoy them and so will our children and grandchildren. Brad was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and then he moved to Minnesota.

And he still cheers for a team other than the Packers… [audience laughing] Even though he went to high school at Eau Claire Memorial High School in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Then he went to undergraduate at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and studied biology. Then he got his master’s degree in environmental science at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay. About 10 years ago, in 2007, he came to the Arboretum, and tonight he gets to talk to us about this wonderful legacy going back eight or more decades. Please join me in welcoming Brad Herrick to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. [audience applauding]

– Thank you, Tom. Thanks everyone for being here tonight. So a legacy of research in ecological restoration is a pretty big topic to try and squeeze into a one-hour presentation. So this could probably be a series of lectures or a semester seminar. I’m going to do my best to scrunch it down into an hour, and so for those of you who are familiar with the Arboretum, maybe know some of the history, you’ll notice big gaps in my timeline, especially with the research and restoration part. So the questions obviously at the end, I’ll be able to hopefully to fill in the gaps for you. But we’re going to move right along on the timeline, and a lot of what I’m going to be talking about tonight is centered around Curtis Prairie, which is our flagship prairie at the Arboretum. It’s considered the oldest restored prairie in the world. It’s kind of what we’re known for. And a lot of the early research and restoration happened at that location. That’s kind of what I’m going to focus on, and then I’ll bring us all the way up to today and I’ll talk about kind of what our goals for research and restoration are. I like to share this slide when I give talks like this because it gives a nice overview of the landscape around the Arboretum. So here, so we’re right in here somewhere in downtown campus.

Capitol’s over here. The Arboretum is about four miles, as the crow flies, south of us. This is Lake Wingra, Nakoma Golf Course here. And so the Arboretum is really nestled in the city of Madison; it’s a very urban area. It’s a green space and an urban area. Even the Beltline actually dissects the Arboretum. There’s a 200-acre parcel here, you can’t see all of it, it goes out of the screen, called the Grady Tract. That used to be connected to the Arboretum, but in the ’50s, when that Beltline went in, it went right through. And so we lost some pines and had some increased fragmentation there.

So a lot of our restoration and our research kind of is either informed or tries to answer questions about how urbanization affects the landscape. And you’ll hear that theme kind of throughout my talk tonight. A lot of people don’t realize that besides the 1200 acres of woodlands, oak savanna, prairie, and wetlands at the Arboretum here in Madison, we also do research and manage about 500 acres of what we call outlying properties. So these are all remnant pieces of property. So original prairie, oak savanna, sugar maple forest. There’s a Finnerud Forest, up here. There’s a really beautiful old growth red pine stand. A lot of these are DNR state natural areas as well, and we acquired them over the last 50 years either through private donations or deeded to us from the Nature Conservancy, those kind of entities. So this adds another, you know, 500 acres or so of properties that we have to manage and oversee, and it’s a great resource but it’s also a drain on our capacity to do restoration.

So we’re doing a lot of work, not only at the Arboretum but throughout the state. And this talk will focus on just the Arboretum here in Madison, but please ask questions about these properties as well if you have them at the end. So the mission of the Arboretum is threefold. The first part is to conserve and restore Arboretum lands. So that’s sort of our restoration leg of the mission, if you will. Advance restoration ecology, that’s the science of the Arboretum or the research. And then, finally, foster the land ethic. And for those of you who are readers of Leopold, you’ll recognize the land ethic. This is sort of our outreach and education component of the organization.

And it was coined by Aldo Leopold in this book that you may have seen once or twice, maybe heard of, A Sand County Almanac. And I’ll just read what it says here, how Leopold defines his land ethic. “The individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His ethics prompt him to cooperate. The land ethics simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, which reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land.” So basically what this is saying is as humans we need to think of ourselves as part of the landscape, not separate from it, not, you know, sort of over it and utilizing it for our purposes. But if we think of ourselves as part of the landscape, then we’ll respect it more. So this is sort of how we think of our education and our outreach objective is to follow the land ethic and teach that. Okay, so the idea for a university arboretum dates all the way back to 1853 and this gentleman, who I’m sure you’ve also heard of, Increase Lapham. Increase Lapham is considered Wisconsin’s first scientist.

He was many things, he was a biologist, an ecologist before there was a thing…a geologist, a meteorologist. Any ologist you can think of, he was it. And he also had this idea that, you know, the university here should have an arboretum and it should be an arboretum of Wisconsin plants, which is a pretty progressive thought back then, that it should, you know, it should be a place for display and teaching about Wisconsin plants. And so, although, you know, 150 years ago that idea was already percolating. And then I’m going to skip now ahead about 80 years. This is what I was talking about, gaps. 80 years, you know, this idea didn’t really take hold for many years, until about the 1920s. And I’m not going to talk about the history of sort of how the Arboretum came to be. That’s a whole other talk, and there have been books written about this topic.

But folks like John Nolen, Michael Olbrich, were influential in designing the Arboretum, getting funds to purchase the land, working with the Board of Regents to make those purchases happen, so they need to be credited as well. But this talk is obviously focused on research and restoration, so I’m not going to focus on the early parts of the Arboretum. So I’m going to fast forward to 1932. All right? 1932 was when the first land purchase happened, and it was a piece of land, about 200 acres, that encompassed where Curtis Prairie sits now, as well as areas to the west and the north. And I’ll show a map of that here in a second. In 1932, some of the land was purchased. A year later, 1933, the two directors were named. And those two, again probably names that might be familiar to some of you, were William Longenecker, who was hired as the executive director. So he sort of oversaw the operational end of things.

He was a recent graduate of the horticulture department here at the time, and his background was plant sciences, horticulture, and landscape design. And if you’re familiar with the Arboretum, you know that we have a true arboretum, a collection of woody plants called Longenecker Horticultural Gardens, named after William Longenecker. He designed the gardens. He planted the famous crap apples, lilacs. So his name is attached to Longenecker Gardens and the Arboretum forever. As well as his counterpart here, Aldo Leopold. Leopold was the research director. So these two worked very closely. They were co-directors but Leopold handled the research end of things, and this included all types of research from his specialty, game management, to plant research for the next– It would have been seven or eight years or so.

And Leopold was somewhat of a new face on campus. As Tom said, he was a professor of wildlife ecology, he was the first faculty in the game management department, or wildlife ecology department, excuse me. And so he brought to the Arboretum expertise in field ecology, game management, and a vision for what the Arboretum should be. A year later was the official dedication, and we kind of think of this as the real kick-off to the Arboretum. It was dedicated as the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, Wildlife Refuge and Experimental Forest Preserve. And at the dedication in June 17, 1934, several folks stood up and gave speeches, Longenecker, of course, and Aldo Leopold. And I want to share with you a few things of what he said, which will kind of guide the talk for you the rest of the way. So one of the things that Leopold said was that the Arboretum would be an arboretum in the traditional sense. So it would be a collection of trees and shrubs, sort of like arboreta are, what we think of them today, specimens planted in a certain design.

But it also contain ecological groupings, which was a new idea at the time. So it wouldn’t just be a museum for individual specimens, it would be a museum of communities. And the real novel idea here was that not only would we have an arboretum, we would construct this sample of original Wisconsin, including a sample of what Dane County looked like when our ancestors arrived in the 1840s. So no-one else was doing this. And this was a pretty audacious thing to try because it’s never been tried before and no-one knew how to do it. And we’ll talk about, throughout this talk again, about there’s two very different ideas here. One is to recreate all the communities in Wisconsin, or most of the communities in Wisconsin at one place here in Madison. And then the idea of creating what used to be here in Dane County. So I’ll come back to this one here in a moment.

He also said it’ll be done for research, not for the amusement of the town. It’ll be for the university rather than for use by the public, basically. He was a research scientist, a field ecologist, and he felt that this place should be a place for experimentation, for teaching, for learning, and didn’t want the public meddling in all of this. He wanted it to be sort of a beside the preserve kind of ecological station, if you will, to do research for the university. And, obviously, that has changed over the years, but it’s something that we still sort of struggle with what we are. We are a research center, but we welcome and encourage the public to come. And so there’s, you know, sometimes balancing those two goals can be challenging, but they’re both really important to what we do. At the end he said, perhaps we should not call it an arboretum at all. It’s so different than the traditional arboreta of just a collection of trees.

So it was really a novel idea, a novel goal. And so, to come back to this statement, so if we talk about what was in Dane County, what was this part of Wisconsin before our ancestors arrived in the mid-1800s, it was primarily oak savanna. And the land survey records from 1835 at the Arboretum indicate that it was primarily oak openings. So, large overgrown oaks with prairie grasses and prairie forbs, wildflowers scattered amongst the large overgrown oak trees, as well as marsh. A lot of the Arboretum is actually marshland because it brings a lot of Lake Wingra, which used to be bigger. And so this is what the arboreta looked like, and, actually, Dane County was primarily oak savanna 200 years ago. And so this is what he’s meaning when he’s saying bring back what Dane County was when our ancestors arrived. But he also said it should also be a collection of Wisconsin communities. And if you think about the 1920s, 1930s, it was really hard for people to get up northern Wisconsin and see a boreal forest, for example, or a real intact pine stand.

It was hard for students to access those kinds of communities. But the idea was let’s bring them to campus here. And so his idea was let’s create things like boreal forests. So they actually planted balsam fir, as well as all the understory components of those systems. This is a jack pine barren. So northwest Wisconsin, north-central Wisconsin is very dry, a lot of jack pine, open barren systems. So they planted jack pines in part of the Arboretum as well as some of the appropriate ground layers species. Cedar glades, which is kind of an uncommon community but is found in southern Wisconsin, it just wasn’t found at the Arboretum, but it’s a unique community that’s a very dry community where bedrock is exposed. So a very thin soil layer.

And the only thing that can really grow there are red cedars because their root can kind of get into the crevices of the bedrock. There’s not usually a lot of fire that runs through these systems, historically, although there is some. But there isn’t a very robust ground layer to carry that fire through. And so red cedars are able to grow. And then hemlock and pine forests. So these communities were not in Dane County, at least very much. They certainly weren’t at the Arboretum. But they wanted to try and create this museum of Wisconsin communities. And, again, we’ll talk about what that meant for us, and it still affects our land management to this day.

They’re sort of out of place communities here. Now we know that. We’ll talk more about that in terms of the restoration and management goals. So, like I said, I’m going to focus the research primarily on Curtis Prairie. And so if you’re familiar with the Arboretum, Curtis Prairie, on this map. The visitor center is right about here. So the original settlement of the land before Curtis Prairie was a thing was 1836, and it was farmed until 1920, pretty much continuously, so 90 years or so. And it was owned by a few families, the Nelsons, the Bartletts and the Noes, and they owned most of the acreages south of the visitor center, where that is now, and most of what Curtis Prairie is. And, again, here the land ownership at the time of acquisition in 1932.

But most people don’t know that part of Curtis Prairie is actually remnant prairie. It was never farmed because it was either too wet or just wasn’t good farmland. So this eastern half here was either a mowing meadow or just was left unplowed. So we consider that part of the prairie a remnant. It was, like I said, I was mowed for hay. Horses did graze for a few years, but the soil wasn’t tilled up. And so, after 1920, the land was left to go fallow. So it was fallow for about a decade before the university picked it up. So that’s what the starting initiative was.

It was a lot of bluegrass, quackgrass, exotic grasses. So the first kind of research effort on Curtis Prairie took place by Norman Fassett. Norman Fassett was a botany professor. He wrote lots of books. He was a very good aquatic botanist. He wrote a book called, I’m blanking on it, Spring Flora of Wisconsin, which is a very well-known book. I went to Luther College and there’s a class there called Spring Flora of Northeast Iowa, and we used that book. Northeast Iowa and southern Wisconsin are pretty much the same thing. And so he was a great botanist.

And he had the idea, he’s actually credited with being one of the first people to float the idea that the Arboretum should create this tallgrass prairie. There’s some other folks that are also credited with that too, but he was definitely one of the first. And so, in 1934, he proposed this project to the Arboretum Committee, which was sort of the governing body of the Arboretum at the time. And the project was called Prairie Grass Dissemination by Planting Sods and Land Now Occupied by Agricultural Weeds and Exotic Grasses. It just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? [audience laughs] Just super easy. Basically what he’s saying is let’s see if we can transplant grasses, native grasses, on this old farm and see if we can create this prairie. And what he was interested mostly is: What method should we use? How do we do this? No-one knew how to do this. It’s never been done before. And so he proposed that in early 1934, and it took about a year-and-a-half for any work to begin because there wasn’t anyone to do the work.

And then he did get a student named John Thomson that started in the fall of 1935. And he was charged with basically collecting this vegetation material from places in western Wisconsin, like Mazomanie, Middleton, Spring Green, along the Wisconsin River, along the Mississippi River, bringing all that material back and figuring out a way to plant them in experimental plots that they could actually track how each method worked. Of course the problem still was that he was just one student, and it was a lot of work to get out to western Wisconsin and bring all these sod back and seed back. So, luckily, at the same time, that problem was solved with the arrival of the CCC. And I’m sure many of you are familiar with the CCC. But the Civilian Conservation Corps was a program by FDR as part of the New Deal, and it was designed to put young men back to work during the Great Depression. And there were thousands of these camps all over the country in the ’30s and ’40s. And there were many here in Wisconsin, and one of them was at the Arboretum, and it was called Camp Madison. And so the CCC provided all the labor as part of the National Park Service.

And so they provided the flatbed trucks, the shovels, all the tools needed to actually get out to these faraway places, transport these seeds and plants back to the Arboretum. The CCC also built all the buildings that they lived in, and we still have many of them. They’re old cedar shake buildings that we use for research. A lot of our maintenance sheds are old CCC buildings. So they’re all charming and all falling apart. [laughing] But they’re really a neat part of history. So this is a picture of John Thomson out, probably some place in Spring Green, digging up sod to bring back to the Arboretum. So he collected sod, hay, and seeds from several sites in southwest Wisconsin. And the hay is basically cutting standing stems of grasses in the fall that would likely have seed in them, instead of taking time to collect seed heads.

Just cutting the hay, transporting it back. It makes good mulch over your plantings, and if there’s seed there, then the seed would probably get incorporated as well. And basically they had two main findings with this research that lasted just one year. The best survival rate came from prairie sod accompanied by prairie hay, which makes sense. If you cut, this is literally cutting square blocks of sod, maybe yay deep, with the plants in them, putting them on a truck, putting them on a truck, putting them on a truck, and bringing all of that back to Madison and then plunking them down on the ground. And for whatever reason, the chunks of sod from a sand prairie in Spring Green worked the best, and that could be because they were probably, with the dryer soil there was probably less weed pressure in that soil, and so maybe they just had a better result because there weren’t weeds competing with the grasses. But I’m not sure why that was the case. So after that, John Thomson got transferred to a different project for his graduate degree, so Leopold was thinking this is going to be a huge project. We need to have a permanent staff member be the person that oversees this work if we’re really going to do it right.

So, in 1936, Ted Sperry was hired as the Arboretum’s first ecologist. He just graduated with his PhD from the University of Illinois, where he did a prairie ecology study. So he was one of the very first prairie ecologists probably in the country, and the Arboretum was lucky enough to get him. So he came on board in 1936, and Leopold was his boss. And, basically, his directive was, “Ted, go make a prairie.” And, you know, that was basically what he was told. Leopold wasn’t out there with a shovel digging sod and bringing it back and doing a lot of the labor. He was busy doing wildlife studies. He was all over the country doing work. And so Sperry was really on his own to try and figure out how to make this work.

And so it was mostly trial and error. And they did use Fassett’s and Thomson’s experiment, the results, and incorporated sod mostly because that was giving them the best result but also used seed because it was so much easier to collect and disperse. And, again, he was mostly on his own out there. And he had the CCC labor, which was key. This wouldn’t have happened without them. And, again, the National Park Service provided these flatbed trucks that were invaluable to the project. Here’s a photo of some of the CCC boys probably out in Spring Green or some place to the west, collecting hay and sod. It looks like it’s maybe in the winter there, maybe the fall, early spring. So, according to Sperry, it was a pretty simple method that they used.

When they brought the sods back to the Arboretum, they tried to get rid of as much of the quackgrass as possible. They dug a hole, put the sod in said hole. That was pretty much what they did. There was really no specific arrangement for how they wanted to do this. It was sort of haphazard. They kind of figured it out on the fly. Again, no-one had done this before. They were the first ones trying to figure out, you know, what species would work, where to plant them. And, you know, Sperry had to decide, do we want to plant these in close proximity to each other to make it look like a really robust prairie planting, or do we want to cover as much ground as possible so it looks like we’re doing something out here? And so he decided, maybe wisely, that they’re going to try and cover as much of this old farm field as possible with plants just to get the plants out there and get them established.

So this is a drawing of, kind of an example of some of the plots that were planted. And, as you can see, it’s pretty much just haphazard. The shapes are all different sizes, different shapes. A lot of the plantings were monotypes. They would go out and dig big clumps of Big Bluestem, for example, it was mostly just Big Bluestem, and plunk it down in one grid. Rattlesnake master somewhere else. And that’s just how they did it. There was some plots that had more than one species, of course, but these are just an example of some of the species. Big Bluestem, and these names, if you’re a botanist or know your plant names, you’ll recognize some of these are older, older genus, older species names.

Big Bluestem, Little Bluestem, Baptisia, Junegrass, number six is actually yellow coneflower, Ratibida, a new genus, Liatris. So these are just a sample of a few that were planted. But they were planted, if you’re familiar with Curtis Prairie, in west Curtis and central Curtis, that was the main planting area. Another photo of the CCC, this might be at the Arboretum, digging holes and getting ready to plant. Or it could be, actually, at one of the remnants, collecting sod. This is probably definitely back at the Arboretum, digging holes and planting sod off the flatbed truck. And I kind of like Ted Sperry, the gentleman there in the tie, kind of directing traffic, and all the boys are looking up at the camera, clearly not paying attention. So it’s obviously a staged photograph. [audience laughs] It’s kind of a funny one.

But they did this dozens and dozens of times. They’d go out, put stuff on the truck, bring it back, and it was hard work for sure. So they ended up developing a planting system that involved both seeding and sodding. They used both methods. And they also set up a nursery. On that last slide there was a box that had nursery in it. I should have pointed it out. But they developed a nursery and tried to grow plants and transplant them. But that didn’t work very well for whatever reason.

One of the reasons could be, actually, that during that first year, there was a major drought and a lot of the plants died, actually. And so the seeds just worked better in that environment. They didn’t need as much water. So those transplants, even though they were just a few feet away at the Arboretum, just didn’t work quiet as well. And generally, they’re trying to space these plantings out. They planted them about four to five feet apart, these sod clumps. And they were all different sizes. But their goal was to cover that old farm field. So some of the common plants that they planted, and some of these are going to be familiar to some of you I’m sure.

This is Big Bluestem, that was a real common one they used. This is Indiangrass, another common grass that they transplanted. Prairie dock here. Compass plant. Rattlesnake master, one of my favorites. And also the Arboretum softball team. I should mention the Rattlesnake Masters is our softball team name. And pale purple coneflower. So these are just few, but these are some of the quintessential tallgrass prairie species.

And they planted dozens of different species during those first few years. So then, the next person to sort of get involved with this research endeavor was John Curtis himself. So he came on in 1941. He was born in Waukesha, went to Carroll College and came to Madison and got a degree in botany. And then, and Leopold knew of him and was really excited to try and get him at the Arboretum to help with this project. And so it took some persuasion for Curtis to stay. He was being courted by other institutions around the country. But he ended up staying at the university in botany and became the plant research director in 1941 and was in that position for 20 years until his death. And so, when he came on, he and Leopold split the research directing duties.

Curtis was the plant research director, and Leopold became the wildlife director, which is what his passion was, especially with game management. And so that worked out great, both for Leopold and for Curtis. Curtis had full rein of this prairie project as well as other plant research. This is just a photo of him. I’m not sure where this is, actually, but this looks like he’s inspecting some Indiangrass. Maybe at the Arboretum or a nearby remnant. So once Curtis arrived, the research really took off at the Arboretum, especially in regards to research around how to get this restoration going and maintained. So one of the really important papers that Curtis and his student, Max Partch, published in 1949, I believe, or ’48, ’48, in the American Midland Naturalist was the effective fire on the competition between bluegrass and certain prairie plants. So, Sperry actually was only there for a year when Curtis came, and then he was drafted into the Air Force and never returned to work at the Arboretum.

He got a professor job in Kansas. But before he left, Curtis and Sperry recognized that in order for this project to work, they had to do something about the exotic grasses, the quackgrass, the Kentucky bluegrass, the Canada bluegrass, because they were really outcompeting their native plantings that they were bringing in. And so they knew that, you know, fire, historically, was a major influence on these prairie and savanna communities. And so they thought, you know, maybe fire could help us not only reduce the abundance and competition of these exotic grasses, but also help the native species germinate and spread as well. So they embarked on this five-year project, using fire in different times of the year and in different sequences. And their findings were fairly straightforward. They found, and they did this in a series of plots. So they had replication and different treatments in plots on Curtis Prairie itself. And they found that burning did reduce a cover of Poa pratensis and Poa compressa, that’s the Kentucky bluegrass and Canada bluegrass, and, at the same time, it allowed these weedy forbs, so not exactly a rare plant but they’re native, native plants and some of the other prairie plant that they brought in to spread into those what used to be exotic grass areas.

And this was compared to unburned control. So it was a treatment, a controlled experiment. And now, this kind of seems like, duh, of course that would work. But at the time, this hadn’t been done before. No-one knew, really, how to use fire for a management tool. And, there were probably other folks doing similar type work, but it wasn’t being published. And, you know, now this is something that everyone sort of just knows. If you’re a land manager, you know sort of why you use fire and you know that it’s very helpful in controlling all sorts of invasive species and that it also helps stimulate your native plants. So this is one of the most important papers, one of the most important early papers at the Arboretum.

So I just have a couple slides here. Some neat fire photos back in the day, the ’40s. This photo here is one of those plots, one of those burn plots of Curtis’. This is John Curtis here overseeing a burn line. Some of the early photos or early fire. Let’s see… And then this is one too. It’s not a great photo, but this is Leopold here in the middle, with a couple students, standing after a burn at Curtis. And, of course things have changed in terms of how we do fire.

Sort of the Wild West back then. We’ve got leaks here in the main hoses. We’ve got 10-year-old kids running around, still smoldering, running the hoses. So we do things a little bit different now. This is from a couple years ago. Our crew, you know, we’re still, we have protocols, we have safety equipment, helmets. Here’s a good-looking crew. [audience laughs] Radios, no matter how big the fire is, no matter how big the unit is, we’re always in contact with each other. So, how we do the fires changed, but why we do the fire hasn’t changed.

And so that’s the important point that, you know, that first experiment which really sort of spearheaded the burning program at the Arboretum. So we’ve been using fire since the late ’40s, early ’50s, on a pretty regular basis over many units, not just Curtis Prairie. And later on I’ll talk about how challenging that can be, burning in an urban environment, much more urban than it used to be. So, like I said, Curtis wrote dozens and dozens of papers on the research at Curtis Prairie, especially looking at responses to management techniques on grasses, for example, germination requirements on different species. I’m going to kind of flip through these kind of fast. He was really into orchids, especially white Lady Slipper orchids. He did a lot of research on orchids at the Arboretum and other southern Wisconsin locations, interested in why, even at that time, orchids were diminishing in numbers due to habitat loss. And so he was trying to figure out why that is, what are the habitat needs for these plants, what are the germination requirements. So, you know, yada, yada, yada, paper, a lot of research.

At the same time, he was doing work at other remnant locations throughout Wisconsin. So he was not only working on the restoration but he wanted to know what plans constituted a remnant prairie or a remnant any community. And that helped inform what plants were planted at the Arboretum, at Curtis Prairie. And so he and Henry Greene, who I’ll get to later, and other students went about surveying as many remnant communities as possible, from savannas, prairies, wetlands, woodlands. And that culminated in this book, which I’m sure you’ve heard of, The Vegetation of Wisconsin, which is a classic book, published in 1959, just before his death, and it’s probably still the most comprehensive analysis of any one state’s vegetation, vegetative communities. It’s still used as textbooks. And so this work informed many of the Arboretum– Actually some of the Arboretum spots, some of the outlying properties that the Arboretum manages were part of this book that he surveyed for this book. So he was a really important part of the research history, obviously, at the Arboretum. But one of his good friends at the time and also was a really important character at the Arboretum was this gentleman, Dr. Henry Greene.

Dr. Greene was also in the botany department at the time. He was a renowned botanist, especially mycologist. He didn’t, he was someone who didn’t care for committees. Who does? [audience laughs] Or administrative work. So he didn’t want to be a faculty member. He was happy being an instructor. He wanted, basically, to be left alone to do research and work with students. So that’s kind of the person that he was. But he was an excellent mentor to us as students.

And, like I said, like I mentioned, he was a fabulous mycologist and produced this paper, which is, “The Fungi of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum,” which is a really comprehensive look at all types of fungi. And I’m not a mycologist. I couldn’t even tell you what some of the species were. They’re kind of foreign to me. But I do have a student right now that’s looking at some of his specimens and trying to update his list, 50 years later to 60 years later. So these historic documents are really valuable in terms of following up on this research. And then he and Curtis also wrote this really great paper called “Germination Studies of Wisconsin Prairie Plants.” And, again, there wasn’t a lot known about remnant prairie plants at the time. What were the requirements for establishing plants or germinating plants? They looked at 91 native prairie plants, and they looked at what does it take to get these seeds to germinate. And what they discovered is that about, I want to say 70 of them needed some sort of stratification, cold stratification, and 30 of them absolutely required it to break dormancy.

And, again, this was new information. And now we kind of take it for granted that of course, seeds need some kind of disturbance to break that hard seed code. And so, you know, now, when we seed a prairie, we often do it in the late fall so that it gets that natural stratification of the freezing temperatures, and we get a lot better germination in the spring. So another good paper there to help inform restoration work. An then this is one of my favorite papers that they wrote. This was sort of a summary paper about what they found, what their trial and errors were trying to reestablish this prairie at the Arboretum. And it was published in a journal called Wildflower, which I don’t even think exists anymore. I want to share with you sort of what their findings were. It’s a nice summary of what they learned over, at this point it was probably 10 years of working on this project.

So one thing they said was that it’s really important to make sure that you get rid of the weeds first. Don’t try and plant native prairie in a patch of quackgrass. Do what you can to get rid of those weeds before you start tinkering with introducing native plants. And they use all sorts of methods. They used direct seeding. They used transplantation of seedlings, like I mentioned. Transplantation of mature plants from these remnants. They used plowing, cultivating, hand desodding. So basically pulling invasive species out, exotic grasses out.

And burning to try and control weeds. And all this proved successful, but most of these were impractical due to high cost and just a ton of time. And so their final recommendation for other land managers at the time was to use direct seeding on to a burned or otherwise scarified soil surface or both, and that would give you the best results. And, frankly, this is how most land managers do. This is what we do if we can. We always try and burn a site first if we can. Preferably in the fall, put seed down right after the burn, let it go through the winter, stratify those seeds, and we get great response in the spring. And so this is what they’re saying. And if you can’t burn, some other kind of scarification, either, you know, grating or raking the soil surface.

The most important part was getting that soil seed contact into what they needed. So this was a great, sort of practical paper about what they found. They had a couple really neat quotes, I thought, that I wanted to share. This one was: “It should be noted that weeds…” and you can read it of course. “It should be noted that weeds are pioneers in disturbed areas, and that once a good standard prairie species is established, there will be, in the absence of any large-scale disturbance, no further weed problems.” And that sounds great, right? And, in general, if you don’t have a major disturbance, you’re going to be probably okay. But we’ve learned it doesn’t take a very big disturbance to introduce new weed plants because nowadays, there’s new weeds, new invasive species always coming on the landscape. And basically it takes constant vigilance. It’s constant maintenance. I mentioned right away that Curtis Prairie is the oldest restored prairie in the world and that’s true in a sense, but we don’t really consider it restored.

It’s the oldest restoration in the world because it’s still ongoing. It’s constantly changing and we’re constantly having to pull invasive species every year to make sure that it stays a high-quality prairie. So this makes it sound a little bit, maybe a little bit easier than it actually is. But in the broader sense, they’re right, that if you don’t have major disturbances and you get the native species complex, that you’re going to be okay. And then, “All in all, there seems good reason to expect that museum specimens of the tallgrass prairie, with their vivid beauty and great interest, will be established and can be maintained in the Wisconsin Arboretum.” So this is sort of their eureka moment, I think. They felt that after 10-12 years they learned enough that they thought that we can do this project. This is a doable endeavor. It’s not going to be thousands of acres like it used to be in southern Wisconsin, but at least there’s going to be a small part of that that can be used for teaching and for research and can introduce students and people into, you know, what was Dane County. This is what was here before our ancestors arrived.

So I think they felt good that they had gotten to this part. So Henry Greene and Curtis did a lot of work together, but one other contribution that Henry Greene made that many of you probably know about is that he actually created his own prairie at the Arboretum. So this an aerial view of the Arboretum. The pink is the current landholding. This is Curtis Prairie and this is Greene Prairie. So this is the Beltline here and this is the Grady Tract. So this is the area south of the Beltline. And Greene Prairie is at the very southern end of that tract of land. This is an aerial view here. This is an older photo.

So, you know, Greene had learned a lot by working on Curtis Prairie, and so he went to the Arboretum community and asked if he could work on this piece of land in the southern part of Grady Tract to see if he could plant another prairie. And he said that he would do it under one condition: that no-one would bother him. [audience laughs] He wanted to do it by himself. He trusted only a few people to help him, but he didn’t want any public there. He didn’t want any help. He especially didn’t want the CCC back to help in any sort of way. Even though they made Curtis Prairie happen, he felt that there wasn’t enough oversight on that project at times. And so he took it upon himself, and this was sort of his personality. He was perfectly fine being out there by himself, meticulously planting plants.

And he ended up planting over 12,000 plants in a period of half a dozen years. Hand-watering them. There’s a well in this area that he just brought buckets after bucketful of water, hand-planted plants. And he, like I said, he was a great botanist, and he took a lot of time to understand the hydrology of the site and the soils of the site, and he planted plants where he felt they should go. So, drier plants that like drier soil went in the dry areas. Wet plants went in the wet areas and along that gradient. And so, as a result, the plants at Greene Prairie haven’t moved that much. They’ve mostly stayed where they were planted because they were happy there, where, at Curtis, things have shifted around a lot because they were kind of more haphazardly just plunked down. But this is– So, Greene Prairie is a 50-acre prairie and there is disturbance problems by storm water and some woody species.

We’ve done a lot of work on this prairie in the past five years. If you’ve been down there recently, you’ve noticed that. But in the core part of the prairie it is a phenomenal restoration, and it’s probably, it’s by far the nicest restoration that I’ve ever seen of a prairie. And others have said that it’s probably the closest mirror to a remnant prairie that’s out there, at least in southern Wisconsin. It’s a very different feel than Curtis Prairie. Curtis Prairie is a more true tallgrass prairie. It has heavier soil, more rich soil, and so the plants are taller. Greene Prairie, it has drier soils and so the plants are lower stature. But it’s a phenomenal, phenomenal prairie.

If you haven’t seen it, I definitely encourage you to check it out. [member of the audience mumbles] Sorry? – [Audience member] Don’t disturb it. – Yes, that’s right. There are trails through the prairie, so you can definitely enjoy it. So now I want to jump forward another decade or so to our next ecologist, Dr. Virginia Kline. And she was the ecologist from 1975 to 1996. And she was a prairie ecologist, also trained here in the botany department. A prairie ecologist and an oak savanna expert. And she did a lot of research at the Arboretum, but I want to share with you one of her really important projects and, again, that we kind of take for granted now but people just didn’t really know at the time how to deal with some of these species.

So she wrote a paper called, The Response of Melilotus alba, which is white sweet clover, many of you are familiar probably, to burning and mowing treatments. So what had happened when we started burning the prairie in the ’40s, we kind of got stuck in a rut. We kind of burned it at the same time every year, usually early spring. And what happened was that this schedule ended up promoting this invasive forb. So sweet clover is a biennial, meaning that it has a two-year life cycle. So the first year it sends up basil leaves, so just little leaves, and then those leaves die back. The next year it sends up a flowering stalk, and then produces flowers and seeds. And so what was happening is that they were stimulating that plant to germinate in the spring with these fires, and it might set them back but then they would have time later in that same year to send up a flowering stalk and, with no disturbance, they would just drop seeds everywhere. And they kept doing this over and over again, and Curtis Prairie was becoming a sweet clover field.

And so Dr. Kline came up with an experiment. And basically found that if you change the timing of your burns, you can drastically reduce sweet clover or any biennial because what happens is that when you do an early spring burn, like I said, it actually won’t kill the plant, it’ll set it back but it’ll allow it to continue growing later on that year. The following year, you wait awhile, wait until it starts to bloom, and then before it sets seed, you send a fire through and you end up killing the plant. And since they’re biennial, that’s the end of their lifespan. If you do that a few years in a row, you’re going to deplete the seed bank very quickly. So she found that burning was the ticket. Mowing also worked but it wasn’t quite as good as burning. And burning was much less effort. The other contribution that she made, she made many contributions, but one of the most important ones was that she wrote a comprehensive land management plan for the Arboretum.

And we refer to it as the Kline Plan. It was written in 1992. And it basically described all of the communities at the Arboretum, and it talked about what the vegetation was at the time of the writing and what the goals for each community should be and how to achieve them. And it was great, and we frankly still use a lot of it today. But it is almost 30 years old now, and things have changed. And so we’re in the process right now updating this land management plan because we have new challenges, frankly. Climate change obviously is a big one. Storm water is probably the most important one for us. We have a lot of storm water issues being sort of at the bottom of the Lake Wingra watershed.

A lot of the water coming in from the surrounding landscape comes through the Arboretum at some point. We have new pest species, obviously. Emerald ash borer, garlic mustard, all these new things. Garlic mustard is not new. Generally urban impacts. You saw that first map of neighborhoods all around the Arboretum, businesses, residential areas, the Beltline. We have these novel conditions. These are areas that have been under buckthorn cover for 50 years, for example, and haven’t been restored because of whatever reason, resources probably. You know, how is that community that is not native to Wisconsin, how has that changed the soil structure? How has it changed hydrology? How has it changed nutrient dynamics in the soil? If we remove buckthorn, can we actually restore anything that was native here? Are we looking at something totally novel that we need to experiment with? And then we have new techniques.

We have new tools to use and new management techniques. So we’re updating this plan now. And, again, one of the reasons is because how much the landscape has changed. So that number up there got cut off, but this is a 1937 aerial, back when the population of Madison was around 58,000. So, again, this is just for context. The purple is the current landholding of the Arboretum. This is Curtis Prairie. So what you can see here is that, really, Madison was still very rural. Mostly agricultural.

The Vilas/Nakoma neighborhood was just creeping up. St. Mary’s Hospital was over here. But it was still very wide open. There wasn’t, like, remnant prairies everywhere, but it was still a much more open system. Very little tree cover, woody plant cover, as you can see, except for some native remnant oak woodlands here, Noe Woods and Wingra, as well as some in Grady. But a much different landscape than present day landscape. So, besides being in color of course, and, again, the population now got cut off, it was around 240,000. A lot more people and just a lot more impervious surface. So businesses, the Beltline obviously was a major disturbance.

This golf course is now here. And so every edge of the Arboretum, every boundary is urban. Right? So that has implications for, again, storm water, invasive species, fragmentation, and it really drives the type of management that we’re able to do. It can be really challenging to apply fire in this landscape. It’s hard to get a permit to burn because the restrictions are so tight on burning in the city. So it’s different than managing some of our outlying properties in more rural communities where we don’t have the same sort of restrictions and urban considerations. So there’s four big changes that we’re making to this plan. And they’re really based on, like I said, what we know and what we know doesn’t work. So we’re moving away from this idea of managing at the unit scale. So these small– Right now the Arboretum is made up of 50 different units, and that’s what we use for our management.

So Curtis Prairie has four different units, for example, west, central, east, and the nursery unit. And that’s just how they were built. We’re trying to get away from that and trying to manage at a watershed scale. So they’re much bigger areas to manage, but it makes our management more efficient. We can apply fire, for instance, at larger scales. And we can kind of think a little bigger, a little more holistically about the landscape. We’re also moving away from collections. So we’re moving away from– And I’m not talking about Longenecker here, I’m talking about the other, the natural areas, if you will. We’re moving away from having these collections of, for example, boreal forests over here, spruce forests over here, pines over here.

We’ve learned that we can’t actually recreate a pine forest system, like there is in northern Wisconsin, for example, or a boreal forest in Port Wayne. We can plant the trees. That’s not the issue. But we can’t plant the complimentary understory species because soils are different, the climate is different, precipitation is different. And what’s happening is these systems were basically harbingers of invasive species. So buckthorn would find their way in there and they’d hang out there, honeysuckle. And it made sort of an artificial edge a lot of times with our prairies. And so we’re trying to get away from these collections, move away from this idea of the state of moving all the communities of Wisconsin to the Arboretum, focusing on what we know, which is southern Wisconsin. We want to focus on prairie and oak savanna and wetlands, what we know was there at the time.

And try and get rid of these sharp edges. So a lot of these plantings, like the pine plantings are planted next to Curtis Prairie. They’re called Leopold pines, so we don’t want to get rid of them. But they make this artificial boundary that you wouldn’t find in nature. You wouldn’t find a pine forest next to an open prairie all the sudden. You would find more of a gradient between those two systems. So like an oak woodland grading into an oak savanna into a more open prairie and then back into an oak savanna. So we’re trying to really grade these systems as much as we can to make them more of a community feel. I’m not going to go through all these, but these are our kind of guiding management principles that we use.

And what I want you to take home today about our management goals is that our first priority, besides not doing more harm when we use fire or sometimes herbicides or mowing, that’s the first thing we don’t want to do. We want to be very judicious with our management, but we also want to make sure that we’re conserving the high-quality areas first. So Curtis Prairie, Greene Prairie, for example. These are our real gems. If we feel good that we’ve maintained the diversity of those places first, and as resources allow, then we’ll move out from their edges and try and increase their footprint. So try and increase the diversity around Curtis Prairie, expanding it out sort of in circles, right? And the idea there is that if we do it that way instead of moving 500 feet into Lost City Forest and trying to clear out a bunch of buckthorn to start a project over there, we’re purposely making habitat that’s connected so that we’re making larger landscape restorations, which benefits wildlife, it benefits native plants by seed dispersal into corridors. And so we think it’s a more efficient, more effective way to manage. That’s sort of our goal now. So now I want to jump back into the research realm a bit.

Dr. Joy Zedler was our research director for 18 years. She recently retired from the botany department. She was research director in Leopold Chair Restoration Ecology for that time, and she really brought a strong background in wetland and restoration ecology. Her focus was on the sedge meadows primarily and looking at, why do some invasive species invade these intact systems? And she focused on reed canary grass, which is one that is really common in Wisconsin, and cattail, especially hybrid cattails. So she wanted to know what are the mechanisms for the invasions? And then, what are the consequences? What do they do to the system? And then, on the flip side, she also looked at how do we restore these systems that have been invaded, either through management or planting specific types of species that maybe are aggressive native and that can outcompete invasive plants. This plant here, on the top photo, is called tussock sedge, Carex stricta, and it forms this early organic tussock. And her, Joy and her students found that this tussock can support a wide variety of biodiversity, a wide variety of plant, just on a single tussock. And so taking advantage of what is there in the system already and adding to it can help build in some resilience into the native community. And when she got to the Arboretum, she also built what’s called the Mesocosm Facility.

So this was, and still is, a more controlled experimental site, which is a nice complement to have when you’re doing field ecology. It’s nice to have some kind of controlled system as well, but it’s not very easy to bring field ecology into the laboratory at the scale that we need to work at. And so she made this large facility with these big tubs. These are actually small versions of that. This is one of her students. And these tubs she could use, and others have used, to mimic natural hydrological processes. So they have a plug in the bottom and you can fill them with water and you can fill some half way up, some all the way up. You can drain them, you can add different nutrients to different ones, and you can have a replicated experiment as well as a complementary field experiment. And so it just adds a little bit more robustness to scientific studies, especially that are field-based.

So we have lots of folks that are using this at the Arboretum. It’s just to the east of the visitor’s center. And so this is a great contribution that she made. As well as these great Arboretum leaflets. And these are all found on our website. And she wrote over 40 of these leaflets, I believe. And they were a way to write about research that was happening at the Arboretum but in a way that wasn’t technical, wasn’t scientific, that the public could better consume. And so there’s a lot of these that she wrote over the last 15 years that other people have wrote with her, and they talk about the research that she was doing and that others have done as well as management and restoration challenges and opportunities. So if you want to learn more about some of the work that’s been done, especially in the last 15 or so years, I encourage you to check this out.

Again, it’s on the Arboretum website under research, I believe. But you can find it there. And they’re, like I said, they’re all PDFs. They’re really great documents, too. And they’re also really quick reads, too. So, it’s not too cumbersome. So now I want to move into kind of what we’re doing now. So we have sort of three user groups that use the Arboretum for research. And we’re making an effort to reach out to other folks that maybe haven’t done research for a while at the Arboretum.

For a long, long time, we were doing plant ecology research. A lot of the people that were involved in the Arboretum were botanists from the botany department, and so we have a really strong botanical, plant ecology background, and that’s great and we will all continue that. But we also want to do more work with wildlife, with citizen science. And so we’re trying to engage more folks into the research community at the Arboretum. So one group is still and will always be important: faculty and grad students. A few weeks ago, I think, Susan Paskewitz was here talking to you about ticks. This is one of her students doing a tick project at the Arboretum. They’ve been doing a four-year study looking at the impact of buckthorn on tick abundance in the Lost City Forest. Dr. David Drake from wildlife ecology is doing the Urban Wildlife Project.

It used to be called the Urban Canid Project, I believe. So the Arboretum is one of those sites as well where he’s trying to collar coyotes and foxes. Students doing small mammal studies. This is the jumping worm. If any of you have heard of jumping worm, we’re doing work on this. This is a new invasive species from parts of Asia that have come to the Midwest. A lot of my research is focused on this as well. A lot of tree and vegetation studies and then a project looking at climate change and how climate change might affect the subnivean layer, which is the habitat between the snowpack and the ground, which is really important for small mammals, other critters that need that thermally stable habitat. And so they have these greenhouses set up in the Arboretum and all over the Great Lakes area where they can manipulate temperature and snowfall and all these things; it’s really interesting.

And so that’s it for longer-term projects. And then we have undergraduate students as well as grad students, graduate and undergraduate classes that come out and use the Arboretum. These tend to be shorter-term projects, but they’re great teaching opportunities for students. And then we also have Arboretum staff and volunteers. And so a lot of the work that we’re doing is monitoring our prairies, monitoring rare species. We’re doing a lot of work right now with bumblebees, plant pollinator interactions, and a lot of these have citizen science components as well. Dragonflies, again, invasive earthworms. We also partner with the DNR on a lot of projects. They have an ongoing statewide bat monitoring program, their frog and toad survey.

We’ve been a part of these programs for a long time. So we’re doing a lot of different types of research now, which is really exciting, and we’re partnering with a lot of different agencies and other folks. We also have several long-term projects and long-term experiments that have been going on since the ’50s at least. One of those is a study of four succession in Noe Woods. Noe Woods is probably one of the longest studied woodlands in the world. It’s not very big. It’s only 40 acres. But it’s been, the process of succession has been studied in Noe Woods since the ’50s. Tom Givnish now, who’s a professor of botany here, has taken over that project.

And, basically, it was just looking at, in the absence of fire, because it used to be more of an oak savanna system, in the absence of fire, what happens to a woodland? And they have been tracking this for 60-plus years now. And, basically, what they’ve found is that it turns into something that’s not really an oak forest anymore. It turns into something that resembles a forest that doesn’t need fire. So these species, like black cherry, maybe walnut, elms, things that are shorter lived but are not fire tolerant, for example. This is an ongoing project. Another project started in the ’50s by a soil professor, Francis Hole, a professor here on campus. He set up litter plots in Curtis Prairie as well as a couple woodlands. And he ask the question: what happens to soil structure and nutrient dynamics if you manipulate the litter on the ground? Because the litter that falls, the leaves in the woods, the grasses that died the year before and that fall to the ground, that gets incorporated, those decompose into the soil, and plays a big part in the soil nutrients and the amount of carbon in the soil. And so folks from Oregon State, folks from the University of Michigan, all over the country, have come to sample these plots.

It’s probably one of the longest running litter manipulation experiments in the country. And we continue with the treatment. There’s annual treatments that we do to maintain those plots. Curtis and Greene Prairie, one of the things that Curtis and Greene, others did, which was great, was that they sampling grids and they monitored the prairies from the ’50s. And so we have data all the way from the ’50s until now of abundance, of frequency of plants. And so we can really talk about trends in the communities. New invasive species, how are the native species doing in light of this disturbance or that disturbance. And I’m not going to, again, I’ve given talks just on that topic alone, but it’s a really important data set to have, the historic data, to be able to talk about what’s changing. Same thing at one of our outlying properties, Faville Prairie, one of the nicest remnants in southern Wisconsin.

Since 1948 there’s been a sampling grid up there, and we’ve sampled it periodically. And then phenology, Leopold, in the ’40s, started collecting phenology data at the Arboretum at the same time that he was doing it at the shack in Baraboo. It hasn’t been a continuous project, but it’s been almost continuous since the ’40s. And we still collect over 200 phenological events every year. So this was the timing of biological events. You know, when the first cardinal sings in the spring or the first crane returns, that kind of thing, which can tell you about changes in climate. And then, like I mentioned earlier, we’ve been a part of the Wisconsin DNR frog and toad survey since its inception, and many others that I won’t go into. But we have a long history of long-term projects. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention our current director, who started in October.

Dr. Karen Oberhauser, who’s now the Leopold Chair of Restoration Ecology and, you know, she brings a wealth of knowledge in terms of conservation biology. She’s a world-renowned monarch biologist, especially studying the monarch migration. Did a lot of work with citizen science. And so it’s right up our alley, what we were kind of going towards anyway. And she’s already brought a lot of good energy and a lot of great ideas for us, and so it’s really exciting moving forward at the Arboretum in terms of research. So I also want to mention one of the reasons why I’m here today is to shamelessly plug Science Day. And Science Day is an annual event that showcases primarily student research, the current student research happening at the Arboretum as well as some postdoc research. And then, of course, our web page has everything that you’d ever want to know about research, current studies, what we’ve learned about projects. So, with that, I’m kind of over my time here, I want to say thank you for being here, and I’ll take any questions.

[audience applauding]