by Mike Saxton and Calvin Maginel

This article was originally posted in https://mbgecologicalrestoration.wordpress.com/2023/12/19/land-abandonment-succession-and-restoration-the-wolf-run-grassland-restoration-project-at-the-missouri-botanical-gardens-shaw-nature-reserve/

Since 1950, over 1-billon acres of agricultural land have been abandoned worldwide. In certain landscape contexts, passive recovery of high levels of native biodiversity in abandoned fields is possible while in others, like the Midwest USA, fallow fields rarely develop into biologically rich habitats. To achieve the ambitious goals of the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, land managers and ecologists need to better understand how to restore these highly altered landscapes.

In 1925, the Missouri Botanical Garden purchased 1,300 acres of battered farm ground in Gray Summit, MO – approximately 35 miles (56 km) west of St. Louis – to escape the deleterious impact urban air pollution was having on horticultural collections in St. Louis City. The intended use of this acreage was (1) to propagate and grow plants, trees and shrubs to be displayed at the main Garden and (2) to gradually establish an arboretum at the site. The site was officially named the Shaw Arboretum in 1933. After decades of development, many non-essential operations at the Arboretum were eliminated in 1958 and many fields were abandoned to undergo successional change. In 2000, the Shaw Arboretum was renamed Shaw Nature Reserve to reflect its contemporary mission to inspire responsible stewardship of our environment through education, restoration, and protection of natural habitats and public enjoyment of the natural world. Today the Nature Reserve consists of 2,400 acres of varied habitat. 

Prior to European settlement, the natural communities of the area were fire adapted, open oak-hickory woodlands and xeric glades with gallery forests along riparian corridors. Post-settlement, woodlands were clear-cut with some woodlots left to passively regenerate while others were converted to row crop agriculture.

Wolf Run Grassland Restoration

In 2016, Nature Reserve staff set an ambitious goal to bring all 2,400 acres of the site into active management to promote native biodiversity by the year 2030. This effort will include restoring open pastures and row crop fields, a relatively simple process. A much more challenging effort will be reclaiming 120 acres of old fields with 60+ year successional development, which is our current Wolf Run Grassland Restoration project.

The 120 acre project area was initially “wasted farm ground” that had erosion gullies “where a freight train could pass without you seeing it”, according to August Beilmann, former Arboretum Director from 1941 to 1956. The entire project area was sculpted and smoothed by a bulldozer in 1953 and then converted to bluegrass (Poa pratensis). “Every piece of this land that looks so likely to be just right was laboriously rebuilt,” said Beilmann in a 1974 interview.

Since 1958 when areas including the Wolf Run Grassland Restoration were removed from mowing and grazing, the site became dominated by eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana), Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii), border privet (Ligustrum obtusifolium), slippery elm (Ulmus rubra), shingle oak (Quercus imbricaria) and ash (Fraxinus) species which are in severe decline due to the emerald ash borer. These degraded woodlands had little native ground flora and were completely infested with non-native shrubs. Tree abundance and species composition had no historic analog. When setting ecological restoration goals for the area, staff determined that much of the site could not be managed as an open oak-hickory woodland, which would have existed at the site pre-settlement.  

Goals for the Wolf Run Grassland Restoration project

• Establish a mosaic of 80 acres of prairie, 15 acres of savanna and 25 acres of oak-hickory woodlands
• Maximize native flora diversity and aggressively manage against invasive species
• Manage the area with prescribed fire

In 2021, Nature Reserve staff marked hundreds of native trees to retain including white, red, bur and black oaks (Quercus alba, Q. rubra, Q. macrocarpa, Q. velutina) and hickory including shagbark (Carya ovata) and bitternut (C. cordiformis). Drainages and wet weather streams were left with a 50ft untreated buffer while a perennial creek flowing through the unit retained a 150ft untouched buffer. A sustainable forester was contracted to remove unmarked trees from the area. Following US Fish and Wildlife Service recovery management guidelines for the Indiana bat (Myotis sodalis) — a federally endangered species — trees were only removed from November 1^st to April 1^st.

The Restoration team has spent the last 9 months focusing on the removal of stumps for the project area. Stumps can be a substantial hazard for vehicles, equipment and staff safety. In order to plant the prairie seed and to effectively manage the area for invasive species in perpetuity, the stumps must be ground down or cut flush to the ground.

Concurrent to this effort has been the site preparation step of chemically treating all of the invasive species and the disturbance driven annual vegetation that emerged post-land clearing [primarily fireweed (Erechtites hieraciifolius), mare’s tail (Erigeron canadensis), ragweed (Ambrosia artemisiifolia)and fox tail (Setaria pumila)]. This step is necessary because diverse, healthy native plant communities have not existed in these areas in more than 100 years. Consequently, there is no native seedbank to support the passive recovery of native perennial herbaceous species in these highly degraded acres.

In areas where stumps have not been cleared, traditional equipment (tractor boom sprayers and UTV mounted spray rigs) for applying herbicide are ineffective. The Nature Reserve hired a contractor that specialized in aerial herbicide application from a drone. The drone flies 12 feet above vegetation and can self-navigate around trees and other hazards. The unit carries a total of 8 gallons and sprays only 3 gallons of herbicide per acre. The effective width of each pass is 25ft. A single battery powers the drone, with a flight time of 7.5 minutes and a re-charge time of 6 minutes. When the herbicide tank runs out, the drone re-deploys to the fill up location, is refilled by the contractor, and then returns to where it left off.

The last step after the undesirable trees have been removed, biomass/debris has been burned, the stumps have been ground and invasive species have been controlled is the final ground preparation. Currently, in 2023, we are again smoothing out erosion gullies and clearing away the last remnants of woody debris with a bulldozer. This effort will ensure effective seed-to-soil contact when we sow native seed in January 2024 and will enhance our ability to successfully search for invasive species in the coming years by eliminating deep ruts and rills.  

Native Seeding and Experimentation to promote Biodiversity Recovery

During the growing season of 2023, the Restoration team at the Nature Reserve has been feverishly collecting seed for this 2024 seeding effort. More than 1,100lbs of bulk, milled seed from ~200 locally collected native tallgrass prairie and open oak-hickory woodland species will be used in the restoration planting. Additionally, these acres are enrolled in the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, EQIP – part of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, and we must purchase viability-tested seed to meet the minimum required specifications of the contract. The hand-collected seed together with the PLS seed purchased from commercial vendors will provide us with ample species and volume of seed to effectively cover the 40 acres to be planted this winter.

Concurrent with the preparation effort, we initiated a research study, which will help inform both us and the greater research community of the effectiveness of prairie plant recruitment amongst scraped soils that have been inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi and those that have not. This study includes paired species from the same genus that have different coefficients of conservatism, which represents a species’ tolerance of environmental degradation, or its fidelity to intact remnant or long-restored habitats, as determined by local botanical experts. Ecologists generally expect species that are dependent on stable intact communities (higher c-values) to be more reliant on mycorrhizae connections to establish and flourish. Species with high c-values tend to establish poorly in restorations, which is one of the reasons to pursue this study. Out of the 10 herbaceous species pairs, some examples include Carex bushii (c = 4) and Carex bicknellii (c = 10), Sporobolus compositus (c = 3) and Bouteloua curtipendula (c = 7), and Oligoneuron rigidum (c = 5) and Oligoneuron album (c = 9).

We added all 20 species at the same rate of pure live seeds to provide each species an equal opportunity to establish. Initial analyses after one growing season indicate that low c-value species germinated more successfully, producing more seedlings and greater percent cover than the high c-value species, regardless of inoculation. We expect the addition of mycorrhizal fungi to have the greatest effects on species during the first couple of years after germination. If the mycorrhizae associate with the roots of the high-c species more than the low-c species, this may help them grow faster or be more resistant to future stress. Future monitoring will show us if there are long-term effects of inoculation. To check for updates on restoration activities and results from experimental studies, please see visit our webpage.