Case Study :
Strategies and Successes in Barrington Savannas
Tom Vanderpoel, Restorationist at Citizens for Conservation
I've been working on savannas now for about 15 years, and while I have found them more difficult than wetlands and prairies, we are making progress. I'm going to talk about 2 sites; Flint Creek Savanna, a 1 to 5-acre site owned by Citizens for Conservation and Baker's Lake savanna, a 17-acre oak grove, state nature preserve. We started working in both of these areas around 1988.
The buckthorn in these sites was typically thick, and you could not even see through it. While our work has been on a smaller scale than Lake County and some other forest preserve districts, we are doing pretty much the same thing. We come into invaded areas with volunteers with chainsaws and brush cutters, we cut down the trees, pile up the trunks and burn it right on site.
A year or two following treatment, we end up with little whippets of buckthorn, which has been a problem. When we first started to cut the big buckthorn it was pretty easy and we were very detailed; we painted all the stumps and our volunteers got to work. Thorough cutting was necessary since these stumps will resprout with 4 and 5 stems. With buckthorn, if you don't get close to 80-90% you're just treading water. We knew that from the start and we were deliberately detailed. We pounded away at these stumps, but we found that when the summertime came and the next year came, we kept finding a lot of buckthorn. The moment we took the shade away, the buckthorn went up fast.
About 5 years ago, we started switching tactics to manage for our seed bank as well.
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Photo by Donna Lee
Tom Vanderpoel
Biography
Tom Vanderpoel is restoration specialist for Citizens for Conservation in Barrington, IL..