By Ian Ableson, Conservation and Stewardship Director

So we’ve got a new piece of land protected- maybe it’s a nature preserve that we’re going to own and manage ourselves, maybe it’s a new conservation easement under private ownership, maybe we’ve worked with a local parks department to help them protect or acquire park land. Great! But the work has only just begun. Land Stewardship, the process by which we go about caring for and managing the lands under our protection, is a long-term commitment.

So what’s involved in stewardship? The first step is to know what’s on the land. Preserve monitoring and conservation easement monitoring are our best opportunities to gather information about the lands we protect. Every protected property must be monitored at least once a year. Often this is done in either the summer or the fall.

Both options come with advantages—summer is a great time to create a species list of plants, keep an eye (and an ear) out for uncommon bird species, check out the hydrology of the property, and gauge approximate populations of local pollinators. In the fall, as vegetation dies back and trees lose their leaves, it becomes easier to see potential disturbances to the property, such as dumped yard waste, excessive mowing into protected properties, and damage to fences.

Regardless of the season, gathering data while exploring our protected lands on foot is one of the most important aspects of land trust stewardship. We can then use what we see to inform our decisions about whether management is needed, how to approach it, and whether we need to search for additional funding to do so.

Land Stewardship – Example: Invasive Shrubs

Invasive shrub management is one of the most important activities in our winter conservation task list. Invasive shrubs, including buckthorn, autumn olive, Japanese barberry, honeysuckle, and privet can all become domineering species in the ecosystems where they grow. Of the five, autumn olive and buckthorn are usually the most problematic in our region.

While autumn olive tends to dominate in prairies, open areas, and dry roadsides, buckthorn instead infests wet woodlands and other swampy regions. Both are capable of completely crowding out native shrubs and shading ecosystems that should have open sunlight, drastically changing the conditions. A wet meadow that’s become a buckthorn forest or an open prairie that’s filled in with autumn olive will have lower native species diversity, attract fewer pollinators, and play a lesser role in local food webs.

Let’s say we have a tallgrass prairie—a rare and exceptionally biodiverse and charismatic ecosystem in Southeast Michigan—that’s slowly being invaded by autumn olive. The first step for any land steward is to determine the extent and severity of the infestation. Have invasive shrubs almost completely overtaken the ecosystem, or are they restricted to certain areas?

Are they growing in dense clusters, or are they scattered throughout the grassland? Have they crept into the neighboring forest as well, or are they restricted to the open sunlit prairie? What native populations also rely on this ecosystem that may suffer as a result of the infestation? Are there rare and/or imperiled species to consider?

For our example, let’s say that the autumn olive is mostly on the fringes of the prairie, near where the prairie meets a neighboring forest—it has a dense central core near one edge and the rest is growing sparsely along the tree line in either direction. In most cases, when we’re treating invasive shrubs, we will do so using cut-stump methods.

Using power tools or hand tools, we cut the shrubs near the ground, then “paint” the stumps with herbicide. The herbicide will prevent most of the shrubs from regrowing, and by applying herbicide specifically to the stumps we have a very directed application method. The remaining woody biomass can then be piled somewhere. In some situations, it may be desirable to burn the pile, but in most cases we will leave it as habitat for all manner of mammals, birds, and reptiles.

Now that we have our treatment method, there are a few different ways to approach the treatment. In some cases, our field crew can go out and cut the woody shrubs using power tools like chainsaws and brush cutters. While fast and efficient, this method requires the most time from our staff—plus it will wear down expensive equipment.

Additionally, the Six Rivers stewardship contracting program leads to days filling up quickly as our crew does contracted work on private and public lands. Sometimes, for extensive infestations that are beyond our capabilities, we may hire environmental contractors who have larger crews or more substantial equipment than we do. However, this is an expensive option, and as a land trust and a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization we need to be careful about how we allocate our funding. Lastly, we can gather the community, get tools and gloves into folks’ hands, and tackle the issues as a team.

Coming Together: Woody Invasive Species Workdays!

Once we’ve decided to tackle an invasive species population with a volunteer workday, it’s time to gather the troops! Sometimes we work with another nonprofit organization or a local park system to help us spread the word and recruit as many volunteers as possible. Sometimes a local company will lend us some employees to volunteer.

And in all cases, you, as a member and supporter of Six Rivers, will be welcome to join us. We always announce volunteer workdays on our social media pages, and generally send e-blasts to folks on our mailing list as well. You can sign up for our mailing list here.

Once we get to the site, Six Rivers staff will distribute hand tools and gloves, lead a short identification workshop to teach folks how to identify the target species, and then we’ll get to work. Volunteers cut and haul shrubs into a pile while Six Rivers staff apply herbicide to the stumps.

In the case of the autumn olive in the prairie, we would likely try to work “outside in”, starting with the sparsely populated autumn olive along the tree line and slowly work our way to the core. This prevents the individuals on the outskirts from starting new core populations of their own. If needed, the rest of the core population can be addressed by a future workday, or by Six Rivers staff using power tools.

After a workday, it’s important to keep track of the changes that occur in the area throughout the region. Sometimes a bunch of native plants spring up right after a workday, smoothly replacing the invasive species that previously lived there. That’s great! More often, however, additional work will be required in the future to continue managing invasive species. 

For a different example, removing large invasive woody shrubs like buckthorn exposes a lot of soil to sunlight. These newly sunlit gaps can be great habitat for mayapple, trout lily, sedges, and other native species, but new buckthorn seedlings will also eagerly fill the space. While we try to keep an eye on all of our protected lands, Six Rivers staff isn’t always able to check every work site as consistently as we’d like. Volunteer land monitoring can be a useful tool for checking the progress of a work site—especially when landowners or neighbors with easy access to the property are enthusiastic about getting involved.

The Impacts

Few winter conservation activities make such a difference to the #NatureNearYou as removing woody invasive species, and it serves as a great example of the importance of land stewardship on protected lands. Effective stewardship allows native populations to re-establish, bolstering ecosystem diversity. Where once there was a monoculture of a single invasive species, now there may be dozens of native plants in its place, each supporting its own network of other species.

In the case of our autumn olive on the fringes of the prairie, the scenario described above closely resembles the real-life scenario we had at our Golden Preserve in Springfield Township. Years of preserve monitoring documented the problem and turned it into a priority.

It took years of volunteer workdays, several additional funding sources, a prescribed burn (a topic for another day), and hard work from our dedicated stewardship staff, but the prairie at Golden Preserve is now a beautiful, biodiverse, and ecologically healthy part of the Nature Near You, supporting many native species including big bluestem, hoary puccoon, wild blue lupine, butterflyweed, wild bergamot, and more. 

Land stewardship is one of the most important ways that we preserve the #NatureNearYou, and we are grateful for the opportunity to do so. Like all kinds of natural resources management, stewardship isn’t free, and we appreciate our donors and supporters for their help and generosity as we strive to steward our protected lands to the highest possible standard.

If you would like to contribute to our stewardship program, follow this link to our donation page, and thank you for helping us protect the beautiful natural areas of Southeast Michigan!