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Friday, January 19, 2024

What is a Grade A woodland?

Ignorance kills. New priorities needed. A new tool shows promise.

 

Rare species are important. Rare ecosystems are immeasurably more important. But they’re often ignored (and therefore lost) because conservationists have not yet developed sufficiently practical and effective tools needed to save them. 

 

Perhaps the first point to make in this post is that there seem top be no Grade A woodlands left. All are degraded. Some may be able to recover high quality with good stewardship.


Serious biodiversity conservation began when we first understood that the last high-quality prairies were vanishing. (How important to an ecosystem is "high quality" - and how is it defined? See Endnote 1.) Savanna conservation emerged later, out of what we were learning from the prairies. 

 

Still, nobody much noticed the oak woods. Common? Boring? Obviously ‘disturbed’ (at a time when ‘disturbed’ meant ‘degraded’). To some, the woods seemed to be benefitting from 'natural succession’ – which was seen as a ‘good’ or ‘beneficial’ process, leading inexorably to something better (beech-maple forest). Those people were wrong. The deep-shade-tolerant flora of the maple forest do not return because they'd not been there. The result of increasing shade is not the rich flora and fauna of a forest; the result is degraded woodland, low diversity, and ecological ill health.  


Higher quality woodlands have been losing their species at the rate of 2 or 3% per year. At least, that’s what was happening to the few sites that have been carefully monitored. A few percent may not at first seem like much, but those losses continued to add up. In the 1980s, some of us advocated that oak woodlands, long protected from the ‘destructive’ impacts of fire, actually needed to burn. With trials and careful monitoring, in time a consensus emerged that fire had positive impacts and more and more woodlands gradually benefitted, somewhat. Yet few or no “very high quality” oak woods were being found and celebrated, and the gradual species losses even in Nature Preserves mostly continued. 


A degraded woodland under restoration. Some would say that no truly Grade A oak woodlands survive in the tallgrass region. For photos of one of the best, see here

As for this post, all the photos come from an attempt to restore quality to Vestal Grove. In the photo above, the herb flora is rich and compact but still has a long way to go in comparison with a top quality remnant. The very old trees are bur oaks showing spreading limbs – or the 'amputee stumps' of such limbs. The 'middle age' trees are mostly red oaks and hickories without lower limbs. As trees continue to be thinned and overall light is increased, perhaps we'll see more bur oak reproduction with persistent spreading "woodland grown" limbs on their lower or mid-height trunks. 


One trillium blooms with wood betony, golden Alexanders, and rue anemone. Other species visible include cut-leaved toothwort and starry campion. The tree trunk belongs to one of the many shagbark hickories. It shows fire damage at the bottom. Many woodlands today have excess numbers of red oaks and hickories, as those species reproduce more readily in fire-starved habitats.  


In 2016, a “wake-up call” made a big impact and indeed led to the “new tool” featured in this post. Dan Carter was part of a crew that evaluated an obscure site for a boat launch. Were there “environmental impacts” that needed to be avoided or mitigated? The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) was proposing an improved road, parking spots, handicapped access, and other facilities at Army Lake.

 

The road was to reach the water through an oak woodland which turned out to be “jaw-droppingly intact” – indeed, apparently the highest-quality remnant in southeastern Wisconsin and perhaps in the whole state. (There’s apparently nothing of comparably high quality in northern Illinois.) As requested, that survey team (employed by the Southeastern Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission) checked and found one Endangered species, forked aster (Eurybia furcata) and some wetlands. The write-up called for avoiding or mitigating any loss of those plants and or wetlands. (Why were those two categories thought to be deserving of special care? See Endnote 2.) 

 

The survey team's report identified Army Lake's rare woodland as the site’s most important feature. 

The other concerns paled in comparison with the importance of the remnant oak ecosystem. The Nature Conservancy's ranking shows high-quality oak woodland as “G-1” – globally endangered. (How is quality determined? See Endnote 3.) 


Sadly, the ecosystem didn’t seem to count. The one Endangered plant species and the peripheral wetlands both were recognized as meriting care. But no protocol then existed to authoritatively identify the incomparably more important woodland community as a priority. It didn't fit into any official category of concern. 

 

As it stood then, Army Lake Woods included ¾ acres of very high quality, ½ acre of good quality (very restorable) and in between about ¼ acre of badly disturbed land (ultimately restorable and therefore potentially invaluable to the long term sustainability of such a gem). Thus, we had here a prospective restored globally-endangered woodland of 1.5 acres. But it was not to be. 

 

Official channels function in mysterious ways. Sometimes they succeed in their intended goals. In this case, they did not. Some of the old oaks were cut, and about ¼ acre of the very high-quality natural area was bulldozed. It was a painful loss to Carter. This defeat established a clarity in the minds of Carter and others. The system wasn’t working. 


An important principle is: Never waste a major loss. Transform failure into a ‘teachable moment’ and inspiration for needed change. Carter reported on the disaster and, at their invitation, teamed up with Wisconsin DNR conservation biologists Amy Staffen and Matt Zine (along with Wisconsin Nature Conservancy regional land steward Brian Miner and others) to create the new official and authoritative “Monitoring Protocol for Assessing Baseline Condition and Restoration Progress in Oak Woodland.” See Endnote 4.

 

This inventory and monitoring tool could have a long-term impact. Wisconsin and Illinois (among leading states in natural areas conservation) have been weak in evaluating woodland sites (See Endnote 3.) If this tool is a step in the right direction, it will be for two principal reasons. It could help us recognize what remnants most merit conservation. And it could help us determine whether sites under management are stable, improving, or declining. 


Currently, such evaluations are made for most preserves on the basis of one person’s judgment. Often the judge is the person responsible for management, and of course it can be challenging to declare your professional efforts a failure, even if the reason is lack of resources. Also, the one-person’s-judgment process has no transparency. Government doesn’t work well in areas that no one reviews. Funding for conservation comes only with public backing. Volunteer citizen scientists, advocates, and stewards can be crucial ... if they’re empowered … and if they empower themselves.  

 

Biodiversity conservation is popular in the abstract, but it needs more public understanding and support. One way to get that is through more transparency and public participation. The new tool does not deliver automatic protection for sites like Army Lake, but it can aid our evaluations of high-quality and restorable oak woodlands, an important next step. 


Endnotes

 

Endnote 1. How important is "high quality" and how is it defined?


The future of life on Earth depends on its ecosystems. As we (to some extent necessarily) manipulate and simplify, we may one day desperately need the planet's once most common and now rare species. Certainly, we need their rare genes for agriculture, medicine, and industry, but we also may need some to restore an out-of-balance planet that has begun staggering toward poisonous rain, loss of oxygen, or insanely high temperatures. Ecosystems maintain balance, powered by the sun.  


Natural areas conservation was inspired in part by Grade A prairies. They are so rich. The INAI showed that only 1/100th of 1% of the original prairie survived as high quality. We cannot perceive all the components that constitute ecosystem quality or integrity or health. They certainly include all the interdependent plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, soils and all manner of soil biota. 

 

In the past, conservationists slowly began to realize that ecosystems lose biodiversity in response to over-grazing, plowing, draining, the elimination of predators, and other changes that helped us for some purposes. Aldo Leopold, while employed by the U.S. government to eliminate the threat of wolves, learned that "the mountain fears its deer." As Leopold succeeded and the deer massively increased, many plant and other animal species dropped out. No one at that time checked on how the fungi and bacteria were doing.    

 

Indeed, our overall understanding of the ecosystem is still primitive. But those gorgeous, intact, rich prairies made some people think, and act. A Grade A prairie typically has 20 or more plant species per ¼ square meter - and most of those plants are rare conservatives. A typical degraded prairie may average five common species per ¼ square meter. Conservative plant diversity is believed to be a good indicator of ecosystem health. The hope is that, if a remnant is big enough to sustain them, the other biota will be there too. 


What does "Grade A" mean? The definition changes. The Illinois Natural Areas Inventory defined: 


"Grade A - Very High Quality" as "Relatively stable or undisturbed" and 

"Grade B - High Quality" as "Late successional or lightly disturbed" 


with the more detailed explanations including language like Grade A: "does not show the effects of disturbance by humans" and Grade B: "not disturbed so heavily that the original structure and composition was destroyed." 


But in recent decades it's become increasingly clear how profoundly Native American humans - through fires, hunting, etc. - influenced the "original" nature that Europe-derived science studied. How far back should we consider that "origin" to go. For most of the richest tallgrass area, the ecosystems began to assemble only 12,000 or so years ago when the most recent glacier retreated. But, bless them, scientists have also demonstrated that many of the species and relationships go back hundreds of thousands to millions of years. They can move and re-assemble over time if given the chance. 


So how should "high quality" now be defined? Perhaps the definition could now be: 


A high quality remnant ecosystem is one that has most of its biota surviving in the structure and richness that assembled over thousands of years. 


Perhaps no rich Grade A savannas or woodlands survive. Very few come even close to the plant diversity of the best prairies, but some of the best do. Perhaps high-quality woodlands can be restored from the healthiest remnants?


(Note on soils: The INAI community classification separated areas by soil type. Sand prairies, savannas, and forests are considered separately from those on good soil, which have sometimes been referred to as "black soil savannas" or "rich-soil savannas." But the INAI just called those "savannas." Thus you have to read carefully to determine whether Illinois' savanna remnant heritage amounted to 11.2 acres (INAI Technical Report numbers for dry-mesic and mesic savanna in Table 6) or 1,300 acres (Technical Report's introduction). The difference reflected the much greater survival of sand savannas, as sand areas have not been as intensively used for agriculture and are less vulnerable to many invasive species. The potential for confusion on woodlands is even greater, as the 1978 Inventory did not distinguish between forests and woodlands. For some details of the 2011 revision of the Inventory, see here.)   

 

 


Endnote 2 Who started this?


Much conservation as we now understand it goes back to Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962. Summarizing its impact, historian Jill Lepore credits Silent Spring with launching “environmentalism” as a global force and in the U.S. provoking the efforts that resulted in Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Clean Water and the Endangered Species Acts (both in 1972). Thus there is now widespread recognition of the importance of  wetlands and endangered species.      

 

Rachel Carson and Jill Lepore “have a way with words.” They’re both worth studying for that reason alone. Lepore praised Silent Spring by saying that, in the history of the planet, books with that much global impact could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Actually, the way Lepore put it reflected Carson’s many previous books, all of which reflected her love of the ocean, its tide pools, and biota. Thus, Lepore actually wrote: “The number of books that have done as much good in the world can be counted on the arms of a starfish.” (from “The Deadline” by Jill Lepore, 2023.)


Endnote 3. How do we Evaluate and Monitor ecosystems?

 

It’s relatively easy to measure Endangered Species numbers and the boundaries of wetlands. But for high quality ecosystems? Some details can be measured. But the vast universe of species and the interrelationships that make up ecosystems are for the foreseeable future beyond our grasp. So we need indicators.

 

Up until now, most people, if they measure or evaluate natural communities at all, use one of two methods: the Natural Areas Inventory method or various Floristic QuaIity methods. Both have advantages and disadvantages. 

 

The Inventory approach was developed in Illinois through the work of John (Jack) White and others in the 1970s (see Endnote 5). Their judgements were based on "lack of disturbance" and richness of conservative species. The resulting Illinois Natural Areas Inventory taught us how to recognize ecosystem remnants and where they were, leading to the acquisition of most of the best ones.  

 

This approach did great on prairies but found little in the way of black-soil savannas. Curtis in 1959 in Wisconsin (under the name Oak Openings) had found savanna to be the most common ecosystem type in the southwestern half of his state. Oak openings were found to have covered an astounding 5.5M acres,  with forests at 3.8M acres, and prairies at 1.5M acres. (These figures for “approximate original area” lump mesic and dry-mesic for forests and prairies, as Curtis lumped mesic and dry-mesic for savannas on rich soil as “oak openings.”) Savannas had been major habitats in Illinois as well, but remnants had been degrading even more quickly than prairies. Indeed, none were surviving with conservative diversity equivalent with what the best prairies exhibited. Had they once had it? As we learned, we began “saving” and “restoring” savanna as best we could. When developing global priorities in the 1980s, The Nature Conservancy gave savannas the highest priority, G1, Globally Endangered.

 

Neither Curtis nor the Inventory recognized mesic oak woodland as a community separate from mesic maple forest. They seem to have been blinded by “succession” theory. Oak woodlands weren’t seen as hallowed eternal nature; they were considered a temporary state, recovering from disturbance, on the way to maple forest. 

 

Yet as biodiversity conservation was studied, we began to recognize that the species of oak woodland were being lost. Species don't evolve over night. Woodlands (like savannas) are ancient communities that depend for their integrity on regular ‘disturbance’ by fire. Some of this history is discussed in Endnote 3. 

 

The Illinois Natural Areas Inventory focused too much on lack of disturbance and, for long term use, depended too much on judgment. Different “experts” had different judgments. Once the highly-trained original team had gone on to other jobs, their work was difficult to replicate.


The Wisconsin approach suffered from their system's Curtis-based approach, which did not recognize the significance of mesic woodlands.  The Coarse-level Monitoring Protocol (2023) presented (and linked to) in Endnote 4 is a new approach that could help conservation practice catch up with the evolving science, in the context of  a less-individual-judgment-based system. 

 

The Floristic Quality approach was developed by Gerould Wilhelm in 1977 for a study of the vegetation of Kane County, Illinois. It became highly influential when it was expanded to cover parts of four states in Plants of the Chicago Region (1994). It had the advantage that all competent experts would arrive at the same results. It had the disadvantage that experts did argue about what those results meant. Summaries of this method and references are here, here, here, and here


Wood betony grows in both woodlands and prairies. In the prairie it tends to be yellow. In woodlands, limited experience suggests that it's often reddish. Millions of years of co-evolution with hummingbirds have resulted in some species evolving red flowers. (For more on that, see here.) Much less-obvious genetic richness may be hemorrhaging from oak woodlands as animal, plant, fungal, bacterial, and other species drop out. Small sites of high quality have better potential for sustainability if nearby land can be restored to sufficient quality to support those species that need it.


Endnote 4. The new protocol.

The new woodland protocol will be posted in the Wisconsin DNR website. It's currently posted in full hereFor comparison with an officially posted protocol for savanna, look here. For a criticism of this sort of approach, see Endnote 6. 

For some excerpts of the new woodland protocol, see below:



Endnote 5

Perhaps we would take our leadership responsibilities and opportunities more seriously if we were to reflect on how greatly our region contributed to the origination of "ecosystem conservation" and "natural areas" stewardship. Henry Chandler Cowles (U. of Chicago) launched ecosystem study in the early 1900s. His student May Theilgaard Watts (Morton Arboretum etc.) wrote the books that raised constituency for it from 1957 to 1975. John C. Curtis (U. of Wisconsin) in 1959 scientifically defined the region's ecosystem types. John (Jack) White (Univ. of Illinois etc.) supervised the Earth's first Natural Areas Inventory in the 1970s. For more see Some History of Biodiversity Conservation.

Endnote 6.

One "peer reviewer" of the draft of this post wrote:

I have to be honest, I don’t really like these checklist scoring sheet type approaches. The scoring calculation seems just as arbitrary and any other approach, and they try and force things into categories too much. 


I understand their appeal (as you’ve outlined), but they aren’t my cup of tea because I have seen so many bad ones that are limited in their utility and are untested and uncalibrated with actual data. They often work in the limited context from which they were created, but when you take them to another site, they don’t apply as well. They are often created, and barely get used, ending up in the dust bins of history.  


But Floristic Quality as an approach remains widely used and increasingly so --- in large part because it is so simple and easy to use. But, it too is not well calibrated with actual data.  And its limitations and strengths aren’t well flushed out.


A few more photos and comments are below: 


The rather dense grass in the top half of this photo is awned wood grass (Brachyelytrum sp.). Perhaps it's so dense that the Coarse Metric would give this area a lower rating. Then again, this grass is not even on the Metric's list of woodland species. Is it naturally more characteristic of maple forest?  The same questions could be asked about large-flowered trillium, big leaf aster, and some of the other species mentioned here. No one really knows the appropriate status of most species in the tallgrass region's oak woodlands. The Metric is based on field knowledge and judgment. It and other methods should improve as we continue to learn more from remnant and restored areas. 


Above, the densest species is big-leaf aster (in bloom). This area in recent years had been increasingly rank with woodland sunflower and dewberry - "Native Indicators of Degradation in Oak Woodland" according to the new Wisconsin protocol. Scything them led to increases in more conservative flora including big-leaf aster (in bloom), zigzag goldenrod, awned wood grass and many others. Will such "facilitated diversity recovery" in time be adequate to control the sunflowers, briars, and other "thugs"? Work and time will tell. It is truly so very much fun to learn how to be good stewards of biodiversity. 


At Somme we have evaluated restoration results using both judgment and FQI. We have experienced such FQI positives as increasing site FQI and mean C, transect FQI and mean C, and average quadrat FQI and mean C. All those measures have consistently improved. Yet we’re far from confident that all proceeds well. Part of the “improvement” may be that woodland sunflower (C = 5) is massively replacing tall goldenrod (C=1). In the early stages, no problem. But over time, there are some indications that this sunflower will shade out (or allopathically reduce or eliminate) many species that had seemed secure. Our four-decades-long experiment definitely seems still in an early stage. 


John Taft pointed out (personal communication) that our species per quadrat and FQI numbers were still rather low compared to a site in southern Illinois that he had been sampling. But that site was substantially drier, more intact, and on much poorer soils, so it was not altogether comparable.


In restoration, different species respond differently to different approaches. Rue anemone (in bloom above) did not establish from our seeding. It was restored only through transplants from quality areas being bulldozed for housing developments. Individual transplants sat there, not reproducing, for decades - but now bloom in some areas by the hundreds. Most species came well from broadcast seed, but some, like big leaf aster, had minor success until more quality developed. Now it thrives in many areas after decades of existence as tiny, scattered leaves here and there. 

Some parts of Vestal Grove have developed a rich spring flora. Prominent above are wild leek, bellwort, and trillium. Will they be reduced as summer-blooming species increase? If so, people may miss the massed flowers of spring flora here. (Notice that there are few spring flora species on the Wisconsin list of woodland indicator species.) But there'll be plenty of rich spring flora elsewhere, for example under maple. 


We considered this area well on the way until, influenced by the new protocol, we noticed that the only trees in this area were hickories, red oaks, and hop hornbeams. A fine woodland may have such areas and such species. But good management should result in bur oaks reproducing here. This recovering ecosystem will probably see its original oaks reproducing and coming to dominate, soon, or decades from now. Our goals are very long term


Acknowledgements 

 

Thanks for helpful comments and edits from Greg Spyreas, Dan Carter, Matt Evans, Fran Harty, Rebeccah Hartz, and Eriko Kojima.



30 comments:

  1. From Will Overbeck via Facebook"
    Amazing photos - Morton Arboretum has good examples of high quality woodland but admittedly when I found the best patches they were small areas next to lower quality blocks of habitat. Can we use the oak ecosystem monitoring forms from Wisconsin for assessments in Illinois? I'd like to see much more monitoring using standardized methods wether it is is higher level transects/plots or just rapid inventories of separate "plant communities" - the new Wisconsin monitoring forms should be useful if adopted regionally - thanks for sharing.

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  2. From Jerry Paulson via Facebook:
    The best oak woodland I know about is in MacQueen Forest Preserve located on Scout Rd north of Kirkland in DeKalb County. The older part of the forest preserve was an old scout camp, and it was managed for years with fall prescribed burns to control garlic mustard. I haven't seen it for a few years, but you should look at it this spring.

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    1. That sounds promising. That's a management regime that ameliorates a lot of underlying problems.

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  3. Plug: I will be giving an hour long overview of this at The Prairie Enthusiasts virtual conference in early February (https://theprairieenthusiasts.org/tpe-events/2024-conference/), and wile I'm plugging that I'm excited to hear Justin Thomas' keynote "Beauty is Stability)--it will touch on topics that land managers of all types (and researchers) should hear and consider...Justin has changed how I see natural communities in ways that have made me better at what I do.

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    1. Well worth it. I hope to check out both Dan Carter's and Justin Thomas' contributions.

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  4. I think the form would work pretty well in northern Illinois, but some indicators should probably be swapped out. When it comes to flat, mesic sites on heavier soils, there are probably other species indicative of high quality that could be indicators. We didn't really have enough information based on the sites we have. Personally, if I were a steward using it to assess progress at a site, I might make shift some changes for individual metric grades or swap some indicators due to the uniqueness of each example/site for tracking progress at an individual site over time, but still track the standard metrics. I recently wrote a plan for a site informed by the already-developed oak barrens coarse-level metrics, for example, and made some tweaks like that for the sake of tracking attainment of plan goals--but the standard scores will still be there for apples to apples comparison to other barrens sites in other parts of the State. The procedure document starts out by emphasizing the uniqueness of each site. Oak woodlands occur across many salient ecological gradients, BUT there is a lot that high quality examples share in common, and also a lot that degraded examples share in common. ...so maybe an off-the-rack vs. tailored fit, but off-the-rack works well enough for most things most of the time.

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    1. Wise words. Some species that seem like good indicators of woodland quality in northern Illinois include yellow stargrass (Hypoxis), upright bindweed (Calystegia), and bracted tick trefoil (Desmodium cuspidatum). But lots more should be studied.

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    2. I advocated for Hypoxis hirsuta here, but we only have two woodland sites with it. We only had Calystegia spithamea at one (while we were working on this, I saw it at another in the Driftless after). Desmodium cuspidatum is also a good one southernmost WI, but another one we didn't have at enough oak woodland sites relative to the others (it's in degraded savanna across the wetland from Army Lake; it's in mowed paths through another savanna I know in Waukesha County. We had a lot of discussion about Uvularia grandiflora and Aralia nudicaulis, but ultimately didn't include them. We also grappled with a distinction between species whose presence indicates oak woodland presently or historically (few species by themselves do, but there are some) and species whose presence in a historical oak woodland indicates high quality of that woodland. The indicators in the metrics are some of both.

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  5. I feel Army Lake Woods is like the northern white rhino. The last bit of its kind but still doomed. At least the 2/3 of high-quality area that escaped being bulldozed.

    I feel like Vestal Grove is a museum replica of something described in historical references as existing but that disappeared long before I was born. Pieces have been brought back together but it is still not whole.

    I look at the Oak Woodland Field Worksheet and wonder if any woodland would rank grade A. No woodland near where I live would come close. Even the best remaining examples have lots of problems.

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    1. Some do rank A, especially by some metrics, and at a small scale. The herbaceous vegetation receives a lot of weight, so if there is still integrity in the herbaceous sod, that's 60% of the ballgame. I lack data, but I'm also sure that oak woodland in the Upper Midwest that continues to support high quality herbaceous sod has undergone as great or greater proportional reduction compared to any other community type, including mesic prairie, even as we continue to lose prairie to passive neglect (#1 cause), botched management, and development.

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    2. I mostly agree. We should restore health to even the very small high-quality remnants. But I'd devote most effort to those that are adjacent to large acreages of Grade C (good quality) woodlands or savanna. There are decent chances that, with good stewardship, those areas may maintain and passively restore important species of plants, animals, fungi, etc. that may have been lost to the small areas.

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    3. These are good points. We need to be much better at conveying to the interested public that the oak woodlands are now as rare and needy as the northern white rhino. There should be shame in the fact that, with so many resources, we North Americans fail to do what we urge people with so much less to do in Africa, South America, and elsewhere.

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  6. I was recently watching “A Virtual Field Trip of Longleaf Pine Communities of the Southeastern United States” presented by the North Carolina Botanical Garden.

    https://ncbg.unc.edu/learn/recordings/

    In this presentation, they listed all the habitats where longleaf pines live. This includes saturated flats, moist or sub-moist flats or hills, dry-sands, rock (Altamaha grit, sandstone, gneiss and schist, dolostone), and saline habitats. Longleaf pine was described as …

    “A tree for all places, a tree for all times.”

    The description of habitats for longleaf pine reminds me of the habitats occupied by our locally most fire-adapted tree, bur oak.

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  7. How this relates to the Oak Woodland Field Worksheet is I feel woody species should be included in the list of indicator species (besides New Jersey Tea). These species live in woodlands but grow best in open areas in the woodland interior where fire would not have been as frequent. I would include at least Amelanchier laevis, Rosa setigera, and Viburnums (acerifolia and prunifolia).

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    1. Rosa setigera is not part of the WI flora...at least not officially. The one site I'm aware of, which I found, is historical wet-mesic bur oak savanna. Viburnum prunifolium is native to WI and a part of oak woodlands, but it's range is too limited for a site-wide assessment and almost all sites where it occurs have become deep forest. V. rafinesquianum is probably more tied to oak woodlands than V. acerifolium. Amelanchier laevis, Cornus rugosa, Diervilla lonicera, Vaccinium myrtilloides, Gaylussacia baccata, and Corylus americana, Lonicera dioica, and Lonicera reticulata are probably the most indicative shrubs of high quality oak woodlands, and these were discussed, but ultimately not included. Some sites also have understory Crataegus or Malus ioensis. I will leave my individual opinion out, but I will say that sites with a lot of the mostly herbaceous indicators also have some representation from among those shrubs. The most important thing was that the indicators worked to help separate site ecological integrity, and the tension is between including everything and including as little as will do the job given the variability among oak woodlands, and the assessment tended to the latter, because much of the reason for developing it is that it requires less botanical expertise than FQA. There are probably sixty other species that we could have put together in an indicator list that would do the same thing; we were just concerned with whether or not it works vs. "are all oak woodland species included as indicators."

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  8. Consideration should be given to how this assessment will make people act. Stewardship groups use FQA as a guide in how to improve a site. Consequently, some stewardship groups pull up Hackelia that becomes very abundant after invasive woody species removal. In fairness, Hackelia does not only have a low coefficient of conservatism, but it also has annoying burs that undoubtedly contribute to the reason it is being removed.

    I look at the Oak Woodland Field Worksheet and ask myself how people will change the way they manage a site trying to increase the grade. The worksheet gives no increase in grade for possessing conservative native woody species. In contrast, if “low/medium height woody plants” or “small trees and tall shrubs” have a cover over 15 and 10 percent respectively then the grade for that category begins to decrease. This will drive people to remove woody species from a site. Without any credit being given for a site possessing conservative woody species, I worry that stewardship groups will remove all woody species. This is not a hypothetical situation. I have seen conservative woody species removed along with aggressive woody species and non-native invasive woody species by those who do not understand they should be differentiating.

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    1. There are separate metrics for native versus non-native cover, so it would be pretty foolish to remove native shrubby species first. Native vs. nonnative is a compositional metric. Cover of various woody strata are structural metrics. This should become evident if you read the SOP.

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  9. ...and we have sites that are overrun with oak grubs (first world problem). 10-15 percent cover is actually very high and makes a huge structural difference. Sites are degrading above that threshold regardless of the composition of that cover.

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  10. The Army Lake images are beautiful and species present are extremely high quality. It should be preserved and managed, but it is not an ecosystem. Area is important in ecology and conservation. One needs populations with recruitment to have a future. Small areas lose species outside boundaries and gain seeds from degraded neighbors. Abundance is critically important. Species lists (and therefore FQI) are weak because only a single individual is counted the same as a species with a population. It is good to preserve natural area less than 1 ha (=2.5 acres) but woodlands smaller than 20 ha will not continue to be woodlands without serious stewardship effort.

    Oaks grow on my different soil textures, topographies, moisture levels and many other environmental variable that vary spatially. Many different herbaceous species respond this variability. When history is added in each place in the natural world is unique. Uniqueness suggests that Endnote 6 is true. Forms will not work well from place to place (as illustrated by the comments section of this post discussing different part of adjoining states).

    Conservationists need to get away from old ideas like indicator species and the slightly newer one of grades. What is a way that can satisfy the legalistic requirements of a litigious society? I propose that the DNR say that every native species should in the state be protected in at least 1% of its historic area. List the sites that have populations (minimum 5 individuals) of each species. Focus attention on native species with the greatest percentage loss.

    Oak woodlands were neglected by the INAI partly because of the focus on disappearing prairie and partly by avoiding access to privately owned land.

    If each individual commentator (including me, but like the others, it is winter) spent the time they spent writing and making-form-choices in the field doing something to reduce abundance of non-native species or enhance the abundance of conservative native species conservation would have had less loss IMO.

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  11. "If each individual commentator (including me, but like the others, it is winter) spent the time they spent writing and making-form-choices in the field doing something to reduce abundance of non-native species or enhance the abundance of conservative native species conservation would have had less loss IMO." Obviously you don't know what the commenters here spend most of their time doing. Also, if you think its all about indicators, you haven't bothered to look at the assessment. It's about ecological integrity. Maybe it's worth understanding how some of the best extant remnants are still that way despite receiving practically no stewardship at all. That requires a viewing them from the perspective of ecological integrity--the drivers and stressors that lead to expression of ecological process, composition, and structure.

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  12. What I most appreciate about the assessment system Army Lake inspired is the conceptual shift it is encouraging us to make: that is, we should start to see woodlands in the same terms that, for a much longer time, we have been seeing prairies. In light of Army Lake, I feel confident that woodlands that resembled the floral (and fungal and animal) diversity of 'Grade A' prairies existed. It helps me appreciate how the similarities between the two communities are greater than we might expect. I especially like the parallel in how higher floristic quality is correlated with shorter stature vegetation. As the plant list of Army Lake suggests, even many 'prairie' plants may actually also be 'woodland' plants, at least in the right (and brightest) woodlands.

    Why the 'Grade A' woodlands seemingly haven't survived as well as 'Grade A' prairies seems to be a key question that may help us understand how to better rehabilitate the degraded woodlands we do have today. To my mind, the metric about leaf litter accumulation touches on a critical part of the answer. We know that litter accumulation in prairies changes the prairie's composition. Given the parallels between woodlands and prairies, it would be reasonable to expect the same is true for woodlands as well. As Dan's and others' experience suggests, areas with little leaf litter accumulation tend to have the highest concentrations of short, conservative plants while thick leaf litter correlates with indicators of disturbance. Perhaps due to the already reduced sun conditions, or the nature of leaf litter, litter accumulation is maybe probably an even bigger problem for the woods than it is for prairies. In this sense, perhaps woodlands are an even more fire-dependent ecosystem than prairies.

    This I think would explain why we have so few very high-quality woodlands. The combination of lack of 'bad' disturbance and regular litter removal (along with associated positive feedback processes) is something that occurs even more rarely for woods than for prairies (not many railroad ROWs through ungrazed woodlands). This makes me think we ought to experiment more with annual burning, especially on the 'flatter, more mesic' sites on 'heavier soils', for which no widely-known 'Grade A' example exists. (As an aside, perhaps one day, after lots of study and restoration, we will have community ordinations for woodlands as detailed as we have for prairies).

    I know of a few examples of annual burning, such as Timberhill Savanna, a higher quality oak ecosystem where annual burning and a little bit of canopy thinning have had huge impacts on floristic quality. I would dearly love to see what the result of annual burning, intensive canopy thinning, and overseeding would be...

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    1. Yes, I see woods and prairie differently--much more structural and compositional relationship between the two, but also both with their more unique elements. I think the rarity comes from the layering of two factors. The first is fenced grazing, which degraded the vegetation and soils in most areas that were accessible, leaving small fragments on ridges cut off by fence lines, tracts very distant from water or the barn, or upland knolls surrounded by water or peatland like Army Lake. The other factor is, I think, the leaf litter. The sod persists now only in sites that meet the above description AND don't have a lot of litter accumulation. I know a couple WI private properties burning woodlands annually in the dormant season following brush/undrestory work, and the results are stunning. Another site in Sauk County is similar, but has maybe lost more species, so the improvement is more structural. ...but it's dormant season burning (in WI autumn through March or sometimes very early April)--not later spring or summer burning, which seems to destabilize (encourage Rubus and opportunistic forbs). We need more sites that demonstrate annual or near annual dormant season burning--even if it may be more frequent than historical, it is stabilizing and seems to work well despite all of today's stressors. I think we also have to view fire as a factor that improves conditions for the old-growth-associated species survival and new establishment versus a tool to control various things--generally other means are better for addressing encroachment/invasion problems.

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    2. Another point is that we often see productivity or richness as response variables from research on fire (seasonality, frequency) in wooded systems. Productivity can be a symptom of degradation--the thermodynamic efficiency of an old growth system isn't just its dry weight, but also the rich array of secondary metabolites it produces that drive specialization and complexity. Likewise, richness often increases as opportunistic/generalist species--including native ones--colonize in response to degradatory disturbance but old-growth-associated species are not yet quite extirpated. That research tells us nothing without FQA, ecological integrity assessment, or something similar. Why don't researchers often collect that data? Oftentimes, I think, they aren't close enough to the systems they study.

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    3. I agree that increasing productivity or "diversity" could mask falling "integrity" or "health." "Biodiversity" is very different from "diversity." Diversity measures reflect merely numbers of species (or native species). The species of low conservatism that invade poorly or insufficiently managed sites may temporarily raise species counts or productivity. Good biodiversity measures (for example random small-plot FQI calculations or the new WI protocol) better assess ecosystem integrity and long-term sustainability.

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    4. Christos and Dan, it could be that (at least in Illinois) we have failed to identify the best oak woodland remnants for two reasons. First, the original inventory (INAI) paid little attention to conservative woodland herbs. Second, to qualify as a wooded community, the high-quality area needed to be at least 20 acres. If we held prairies to that standard, we wouldn't have found any of them either.

      But if, as with prairies, we were now to recognized the value of very-high-quality woodland patches as small as one-quarter acre, then perhaps, with good management, such areas could expand and help to restore larger woodlands. Are there strips with high woodland biodiversity in cemeteries or along railroad rights of way that, with good management, could help restore large adjacent woodlands?

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  13. We need multiple assessment protocols. The Wisconsin DNR tool measures ecological integrity, useful for identifying remnants & ranking sites for restoration consideration.

    For ranking of restoration potential, we need to grade how difficult it is to control the most problematic invasive species in a given community type with a given level of degradation. We also should incorporate resource availability for that geographic area into the decision. In addition, are the surrounding properties a sea of invasives that will continuously reinfect the preserve?

    For ranking of restoration progress, integrity assessment could be supplemented with species abundance & evenness or weighted mean C. But the choice of metrics depends on site goals & degree of degradation. Compared to a remnant, metrics will be different for sites managed primarily for specific elements (like pollinators or birds) or large, more degraded sites.

    There are multiple ways to rank at a regional or statewide scale depending on the goal. One goal is site acquisition priority with emphasis on ecological integrity & rarity, the need to preserve several geographically separated sites of a given community type, size of a site & land prices. Another goal is regional resilience, where connectivity, climate change resilience, size of a site, buffer size & preservation of all life forms (animal, plant, insect) are considered. I think the result of regional ranking should be a mix of small/high quality & large/more degraded sites.

    Another ranking system could apply to individual practitioners, so they can decide which sites are destined to degrade no matter how much effort is expended and which sites are most likely to benefit from their hard work.

    So I see the Wisconsin DNR tool as an important element in a preserve ranking system that has yet to be created.

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    1. Don Osmond makes hugely important points above. Our best ecological decision-making currently is by expert judgment. Bless them, the people who do their best at this. But expert judgment is not remotely good enough.

      Nature Preserves deteriorate because a) we devote insufficient resources to monitoring their health, b) the science of diagnosing problems is poor, and c) in large part for the two previous reasons, few sites get the care they deserve.

      To make it worse, most research is not effectively focused on needs and solutions.

      Monitoring needs to be quicker, easier, and more objective. Given the state of the science, we have a long way to go if we are to slow the losses and celebrate biodiversity recovery.

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  14. The assessment worksheet and protocol are now up on the WDNR website: https://apps.dnr.wi.gov/biodiversity/Home/detail/communities/9135

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  15. Interesting and important conversation and work. I ran the metrics for an oak “woodland” restoration and based on my somewhat conservative estimates I got 3.55 (A-). Previous condition was boxelder, black cherry, buckthorn, honeysuckle, garlic mustard as recently as 2017. Stephen, have you run the numbers on this for Somme? I would expect it’s at least an A-. To my eye your woodland photos are of exceptional quality and must have at least 20 species in a square meter. Maybe John Taft should head north and do some sampling to eliminate observer bias.

    The plotless method seems the most dicey part of this for me. For a tool that’s designed for non botanists, there’s a lot of art/skill to delimiting the sample area and calibrating the percent cover to such a large/uncertain area. But I get it. This tool should get used! Would be nice if results could be stored and compared somewhere.

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    1. Drew, we haven't calculated the WI metrics at Somme. It would be a good exercise. I agree that the dependence on the varied levels of "art/skill" of observers is a challenge. At Somme we have the advantage of a permanent transect of meter-square plots sampled every two years since 1985. (See https://woodsandprairie.blogspot.com/2020/10/a-celebration-of-vestal-grove-study.html .) The disadvantage of that data is that - as we experimented here and there with possible improved management strategies - we carefully avoided the areas of the permanent plots - because we wanted them to maintain true data on the woods overall. Sadly, all the higher-quality spots in the photos are from areas where we experimented with specialized approaches - especially scything woodland sunflower. That seemed to be a big (long term?) help. Starting last year we began to scythe some of the permanent plots while leaving others un-scythed. It will likely take years before we see clear results, but we look forward to learning more.

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