July 10, 2003
Students work to restore damaged landscapes
This year, as players kicked the first balls around Grass Lawn Park’s $1.2 million techno-wonder soccer field — complete with a patented carpet backing, infill of pelletized rubber and polyethylene and polypropylene “grass” — UW students in another part of the park were creating space for a field of natural-wonder.
After clearing an area choked with reed canary grass and Himalayan blackberry canes the students, members of the year-long restoration ecology program for seniors and graduate students, layered in thick mulch to discourage weedy species and then planted such things as cedar, bulrush and alder, all plants native to this area and observed growing in other parts of Grass Lawn Park.
The work was through the UW’s Restoration Ecology Network, a three-campus program conducting classes and research on restoration ecology. The program was established in 1999 with a UW Tools for Transformation grant. This year students had chances to work on projects ranging from turning a Tacoma gravel pit into a forage area attractive to elk and other wildlife to restoring areas of various city parks so native plants have a fighting chance.
Repairing damaged ecosystems goes beyond just replacing non-natives with native plants, according to instructors Kern Ewing, professor of forest resources, and Warren Gold, associate professor of interdisciplinary arts and sciences at UW Bothell. New plantings don’t stand much chance without first considering and restoring such things as a site’s hydrology (the way water moves through or pools in an area) and its soils.
Successful restoration also relies on public reaction and support. Being swooped down on by community activists, who’d previously fought a sewage treatment facility proposed at Bothell’s Thrasher’s Corner Park, was unexpected, said UW student Troy Coleman. The UW student team had purposefully selected a part of the park where people driving by could see them working, Coleman said, but they didn’t realize their community outreach would involve calming concerned neighbors.
Building public awareness is one aspect of maintaining a site once it’s restored. “Maintenance is the biggest challenge for such projects,” Gold says. That’s why preparing a maintenance and monitoring plan, and training the client about the plan, is as much a part of the project as the initial work plan and the actual clearing and digging. “It’s a challenge to the students to come up with schemes that keep the project maintained.”
The number of aspects to be considered at various sites —including the human element of people who use the areas — makes restoration ecology multidisciplinary and very much a team-endeavor. This year’s six teams of students came from all three UW campuses and such varied disciplines as zoology, horticulture, landscape architecture, anthropology, fisheries and sustainable resources sciences.
Chuck Pettis, the owner of Earth Sanctuary, a 72-acre private forest on Whidbey Island meant as a spiritual haven and nature reserve, asked one student team to not only use suitable native plants, but also ones with spiritual and medicinal purposes. So the students delved into local Native American ethnobotany.
The Earth Sanctuary project was also a lesson in flexibility, according to student Michael Cooksey. The actual site work is done spring quarter, sometime during which a pair of osprey were expected to return to a nest site near the restoration work. Invasive species were removed or repressed. Then amidst debate about how thickly to mulch the site, considering how much time they might have, a 6-inch layer of mulch was spread. Maybe they shouldn’t have spent that much time mulching, Cooksey said in hindsight, because there was only time to install about a third of the plants before the osprey returned.
“The students learn how big and complicated a project can be when you have to tie together science, management and community reaction to a restoration project,” Ewing says. “I hope that they also learn how to get through all the setbacks afforded by this mixture of viewpoints, technologies, history and such.”
Local parks and agencies, utilities, non-profit organizations and private firms work with UW faculty to develop request-for-proposals. If a proposal developed by students is satisfactory, the students prepare a detailed restoration work plan and set to work, usually with assistance from volunteers and the client.
Student projects also help to advance the science of ecosystem restoration. For instance, one group designed restoration efforts and experiments so that the results might help guide future work reclaiming a gravel pit in Tacoma on property now owned by Tacoma Power.
Part of the site had already been reseeded with grass and Tacoma Power asked the students to start establishing areas with native shrubs attractive to elk and other wildlife. In the dry, gravelly area of the former pit the students set up experimental plots to, for example, see how much hydrogels (a product that holds water in the soils longer) and biosolids increase the survival of the plants.
“They are very interested in finding out what’s effective so they can do similar things in the larger area,” said team member Jessica Moore.
