- Thank you, everybody, for coming to my presentation today
about the Heritage Oak Project.
My name's Matt Noone, and I work for
the Capital Area Regional Planning Commission,
and I'm also with the Dane County Tree Board.
So this is gonna be a presentation about an inventory
of all the oldest oaks that we have here in Dane County.
These trees have been on our landscape
before America was America.
Most of these trees we estimate to be well over 200 years old.
So this has also been a partnership
with the Wisconsin DNR
and the State Cartography Office as well.
So here are two Heritage Oaks; this is in Warner Park.
So quickly I realized the key to success of this project
is involving as many kids as we can of all ages,
and so far, we've probably involved
several hundred children at this point in this project,
amongst many other adults as well.
So here's a brief outline.
I'm gonna talk about why we're talking about oaks
in the first place here.
Oaks are the dominant historical vegetation.
They're a long-lived species.
They're the only tree that's gonna live up to 200 years
in this area typically,
and they're also very important for wildlife.
So then I'll talk about the original Heritage Oak Project,
which began in 1976.
It was updated in 2001 by the Tree Board and Bruce Allison.
And then in these last two years, we've revisited
that original inventory and updated it a third time.
And then finally, I'm gonna talk about this side project
that kind of spurred off of this Heritage Oak Project,
where we're actually collecting acorns
from these Heritage Trees, these 200-year-old trees,
and growing them in several different locations.
So the National Wildlife Federation says
oak species are a keystone species for wildlife.
There's over 436 species of caterpillars
that are found in the canopies of oak.
But I think more importantly,
there's a cultural connection to some of these old trees,
something that's, like, linking humans to the landscape.
Often whenever there's one of these big Heritage Trees
that falls down, it ends up in the news.
So here are a couple examples.
And now I'll tell you a little bit about the red oak group
and the white oak group, and some of the key differences.
So red oaks, they have acorns that take two years to mature
and the acorns germinate in the spring, whereas white oaks,
their acorns only take one year to mature
and they germinate in the fall.
So the red oaks, they have pointed leaf lobes.
The white oaks have rounded leaf lobes.
All of species in the red oak family,
or all the species in the white oak family,
they all readily hybridize within their group,
so it can make it difficult to differentiate
some of the different species at times.
And then the red oaks,
they typically grow faster than the white oak family
and they also don't live quite as long.
And so there's a lot of variety amongst or within a species,
and also a lot of variety
in species across its distribution.
And so we're talking about Heritage Trees here.
So that's referring to a tree that's at least 200 years old.
So 11-foot circumference tree for a red oak family,
'cause they grow faster,
is what we consider a Heritage Tree.
And then for a white oak family,
we're using a 10-foot circumference
to qualify a Heritage Tree.
And just to give you an example,
so if we're thinking about diameter,
that would be about a 38-inch diameter for a tree
would represent a 10-foot circumference.
So now I'm gonna talk a little bit about
the Dane County landscape
prior to European-American arrival.
So prior to settlement,
before the government could settle Dane County,
the land had to be surveyed.
So without the survey, the land couldn't be distributed
to the railroad companies, timber barons,
settlers, farmers, that type of thing.
So with this survey that began in 1832
and ended in 1835,
there were detailed land surveyor notes
about the landscape,
and then they also had these sketch maps here.
And between the sketch maps and the land surveyor notes,
you can really depict the general landscape transitions.
And more importantly, there's also these witness trees.
So surveyors traverse the landscape
in quarter-section grid patterns
and they establish the monuments.
And every time they established a monument,
you had to have one to three witness trees
to relocate that monument.
So when you have these witness trees,
the diameter of the tree, the species was recorded
in addition to the distance and the azimuth
back to that monument to help you relocate it.
So through the witness tree data,
it can really give us a picture
of what the landscape looked like
at the time prior to European-American settlement.
And so at this time,
the landscape was almost completely dominated
by an oak savanna or oak gap landscape,
or just very few trees per acre.
And so prior to European-American arrival,
there was frequent fires.
But after settlement, the fire suppression
and a lot of ag development
had dramatically changed the forest here forever.
So these are the witness trees in 1834.
So 90% of the over 7,600 witness trees were oak species.
So as you could see, a very dominant oak.
Where there are no witness trees in these areas,
that's because there were prairie,
there was no trees there whatsoever.
This is a map of all the bur oak witness trees.
So that constituted 63%
of all the witness trees in Dane County.
And then 20% of all the witness trees were white oak,
and 14% of the trees were black oak or red oak.
So as you can see, all three of the dominant species here
are found pretty much throughout the landscape.
And this is looking at a density trees-per-acre map.
And you can see that most of Dane County
had less than 15 trees per acre.
But, like, one thing to note,
some of these trees that are grown in the open areas,
they can have quite large canopies,
almost like a quarter-acre canopy for one large bur oak.
These are the white oaks that you can find in Wisconsin.
So the white oak,
swamp white oak is much less commonly found,
bur oak, and then chinkapin oak
you can find out on the Mississippi Bluffs.
Here are the red oaks, northern pin oak,
red oak, and black oak.
And then there's also some historical reports
that shingle oak was in Wisconsin.
So that could have been an example of a local extinction.
And now I'll talk about the second part of my project,
the Heritage Oak Project itself.
So this is a 50-year-old project that actually began in 1975.
And so, again, it's a collaboration
between the Tree Board, CARPC, State Cartographer's Office,
but it's also a collaboration between anyone and everyone
because it's a citizen scientist crowdsource project.
Anybody can contribute to it and add to it.
So this is Walter Scott.
He's in the Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame.
He's the one that initiated
the original Heritage Oak Survey.
So I'll just read a quote for you from him.
"Trees are a living heritage that we have in common
"with Black Hawk, Abraham Lincoln, and the early explorers
"and leaders of our nation and state.
"Their beauty, ecological value,
"and utility to our forefathers will reach
into the future of our descendants."
So in 1975, there was a class,
a history class in Spring Harbor.
They came to Walter Scott
and they asked him if there were any trees
across the landscape that were present
when Black Hawk retreated through the isthmus in 1832.
And so that's kind of like what set Walter Scott off.
He did an inventory
of all the trees in Spring Harbor with the students.
But then in 1976, along the same kind of lines,
he extended that survey
to look just at oak trees within an eight-mile radius
of the capitol.
And so that was the original Heritage Oak Project.
One more quote from Walter Scott.
So this is a article from The Cap Times, 1976.
"How many can we preserve for the tricentennial in 2076?
"This would require a determined effort
"to keep them all alive and well
"with a willingness to allow a place for them
"in an environment rapidly filling with asphalt
and concrete development."
So this is a picture of the largest red oak
in Wisconsin in 1976.
You can see it's a fairly open canopy around it.
And here you can see that same exact tree
in a closed-canopy environment in 2023.
So this is our web app here.
You can click on any tree and it will show you the picture,
and it will list the measurements
and all the different years that it's been inventoried.
So as to date,
we've had probably over 50 different citizen scientists
to help contribute, add trees to this map,
or verify some of the original existing trees.
So the black trees on this map,
they represent trees that are no longer on the landscape
from the original inventory.
So trees that have died.
The green are trees that are still on the landscape
from the inventory,
and we've verified that they're alive.
And then the red trees
are new trees that weren't in the inventory
that we've added.
And so to add a tree to the inventory, all you have to do
is take a measurement, make sure that it's large enough,
that it's estimated to be 200 years old,
and take a picture of the tree.
So I used to help out finding the biggest trees in Oregon
with the Champion Tree project there.
And so I learned from my friend out there
that there's a proper way to do your tree posing gaze,
and then there's a more fun tree posing gaze.
But it is good to have pictures of people
next to the trees for scale.
So in the original inventory in 1976,
there were 443 Heritage Trees identified.
By 2001, we found that there were 72%
of those trees remaining.
And then by 2023, we saw that there was only 42%
of those trees, those original Heritage Trees remaining.
We've also added 113 new trees to the inventory as well.
Here's a distribution map of the species.
So you can see bur oaks,
they're kind of scattered distribution
throughout the county,
whereas the red oaks and the white oaks,
they tend to be more closely aligned to water bodies.
And I don't really see much of a pattern for trees
that are no longer present.
So this is looking at the number of oaks
in the inventory each year by species.
So you could see overall, 42% of the original trees
are still in the landscape.
With the red oaks, there's only 23%
of the trees still in the landscape,
but that's not really too surprising to me
because red oaks typically don't live as long
as the white oaks.
So not all these trees are lost due to development.
Some of them is just natural cause of death.
Just a different way to look at the chart.
It shows you how many trees were lost each time period
by species and how many trees were added.
So we've had a lot of interest in this Heritage Tree Project
for quite some time,
and a lot of people have been contacting me,
they want to be kept up to date.
So we kind of created this little newsletter
to keep people involved that want to know about the project.
So that's what this here is.
It's our newsletter called
"Dispatches from the Living Artifacts."
So this is the third part of the presentation.
So this is where we're gonna get into growing the trees
and planting the trees.
And I just have a little quote here from the newsletter
just to kind of paint the picture of what it's like
to try to collect some of these acorns.
So, "On the afternoon of August 20, 2022,
"the car was loaded up with wagons, empty garbage cans,
"tarps, five-gallon buckets,
"and most importantly, the bagging-up machine.
"We headed out to the Yahara Hills Golf Course,
"where a golf cart was waiting, ready to assist us
"with our acorn collection.
"My 4-year-old son and I had been searching
"for Heritage Oak Trees for the previous several months,
"always looking for trees, sometimes with binoculars,
"that would have a bumper crop of acorns in the fall,
"only to be disappointed time and time again.
"In fact, we were barely able to find any oak trees
with acorns in Dane County."
So this was a state champion swamp white oak on UW campus.
I've nominated this one,
but it was only the champion for about two to three weeks
before someone found a bigger one in Waukesha.
But this is just a picture of the State Cartographer Office
where it's showing them the proper way to measure a tree.
So this is the Bag-A-Nut machine.
It kind of works like a driving range.
Sometimes they have those machines
with all the little fingers that you push
and roll over the golf balls, it grabs a golf ball
and spits it back out into the hopper.
So it's the same kind of idea basically.
And then my last quote from Walter Scott.
"From the finest and best oaks,
wise persons will secure acorns for planting."
So most of the acorns that we collected,
we've collected over 200 acorns,
or 200 gallons of acorns from these Heritage Trees.
Most of them ended up going to the DNR nursery
and they're growing them out in Boscobel,
and they require that the tree be of natural origin.
So that means that they wanna make sure
that the tree has locally-adapted genetics
to the climate and the landscape.
And the only way that you can be sure of that
is that the tree is an old, old tree that has been around
before Wisconsin was Wisconsin, basically.
So I'll talk to you about some of the challenges
when it comes to collecting and growing and storing acorns.
So first, as I said before,
finding a Heritage Oak with an adequate mast
is a lot more tricky than you think.
Just in the last two years I've been doing this,
I've probably only found four trees that had a acorn mast
that was worth collecting.
And that's after searching all summer
and keeping an eye out on this.
And then the second is beating the rodents
and the birds to the acorns.
It's probably the most challenging part.
Then you have to store the acorns somewhere cool
'cause it's summertime.
And sometimes, you can end up collecting a lot of acorns
and none of them are even viable too.
So we'll talk about how to test for viability.
So back to the rodent-proofing, you know,
I heard from other tree growers that it's a big deal
to rodent-proof your acorns and your little saplings.
And so I did.
But then I figured once the tree was 17 inches tall,
that we were fine.
I didn't have to worry about the rodents anymore.
But the rodents would still come and they'd rip out the tree,
they'd throw it on the ground just for the acorn
that's still attached to it, providing nutrients to the tree.
So I thought, you know, this is a live trap.
I thought if I could maybe remove
one or two of these chipmunks from my yard,
I wouldn't have to worry about them doing this anymore.
But after, like, three or four weeks
of catching two chipmunks every single day,
I realized that there's an unlimited supply
of chipmunks and rodents in an urban environment.
So there's nothing you can do about that. [laughs]
Or, well, there is something.
These are the rodent-proof cages I then started building.
So it's, like, quarter-inch hardware cloth,
the top removes, and it gives the trees enough room
to grow for two years.
So each one of these cages holds about 200 tree pots.
So then there's the float test.
Once you collect all your acorns,
then you want to float them and test for viability.
So if they float, they're no good.
You can compost them.
But the ones that sink, those are the viable acorns,
the ones that you want to keep.
And sometimes, you might end up collecting
20 gallons of acorns
and find out that every single one of 'em floats too.
So here's an example.
I said that the white oak, they germinate in the fall,
and you can see, they chewed out that root
basically right away.
These ones were actually germinating on the tree.
They can even do that in the right conditions.
So once they start putting out that root,
you basically have to store 'em,
put them in cold storage right away,
or else the root can desiccate.
So here are the storage, you keep 'em in the refrigerator.
Another way to test your acorns,
if you wanna just do a sample of some of the acorns
you're gonna collect, you could just cut 'em in half.
If they're, like, brown or buggy or kind of soft,
then they're no good.
But if they're this white or cream color,
then they're worth keeping.
So now we started growing these acorns
in a few different locations in Madison.
This is at UW Extension; this is my backyard.
We've grown them in a couple other places, as you'll see.
So this is a acorn collection at St. Dennis.
These are some bur oak Heritage Oaks in 2023.
Here we are collecting at Schenk Elementary.
So we didn't even need the Bag-A-Nut machine for this.
We just got the snow shovels and brooms
and filled up our buckets in no time at all.
So, yeah, we found all these acorns
from a Heritage Tree at Schenk.
So I ended up calling the principal
and asking her if she'd be interested in growing
some of these trees with the Dane County Tree Board
on her property.
So she was really excited about it.
And so we ended up getting some
of the kindergartner classes to come out there.
And first we took 'em to the tree and we told 'em,
you know, "Why trees are important,"
you know, "Tell us the different parts of the tree,
the roots, the leaves."
Then we asked them where acorns come from,
and they say China or Mexico. [laughs]
And so then after we take 'em to the tree,
then we bring 'em back to where the tree cage is
in their garden area and we give them the pot,
we give 'em a seed,
and they put their popsicle stick in there
and they go put it in the tree cage.
So the next week, we did another tree planting
with Nuestro Mundo.
So here we had, like, a bunch of different education stations.
So this is the Baby Oak Education Station.
So before it's even become a tree.
So we have the kids sit down and we do the same thing.
We say, "Why are trees important?"
and talk to the kids about what we're gonna do that day.
And then we give them their tree pot,
they fill it up with soil.
Then they come to me, I'll give them two acorns,
they put two acorns in the pot,
and then they bring the pot over to my friend Brian
here in the tree cage,
and they say, "Grow, tree, grow." [laughs]
And after that, the kids go to a different workstation
with a different teacher, a juvenile oak.
They sit under the tree, it's about 20 years old
or something like that, and we read them a book.
And then we take them to their Heritage Oak on their campus
as the last tree.
And this particular event was really successful
'cause right after, the school was getting out,
basically, right after the kids cycled
through the workstations.
And so all the families that were coming by
to pick up their kids, they'd all come
and plant a few trees as well.
And then probably the biggest success of this project
is our partnership with the DNR nursery.
So most of the acorns that we collected, we sent to DNR,
and this is from this June, or I think June.
And now currently we're growing
over 10,000 bur oaks in Boscobel,
and over 11,000 red oaks in Boscobel.
So these are gonna be used
for reforestation projects throughout the region.
And so we gave them another a hundred gallons this year,
so in total, there'll probably be like 40,000 trees
that we're growing with DNR.
So with that, I'll just say what's next.
We're getting 300 trees to give away in April,
Heritage Trees that we're growing.
We want to continue to work with schools,
and I would like to see tree growing projects
with as many schools as possible.
There's many people to thank for this project.
A lot of people have been involved, hundreds of kids,
many, many other organizations as well.
With that said, how can you help?
I guess if you know of a Heritage Tree,
feel free to add it to the inventory.
Or if you know of a school
that's interested in growing oaks on their property,
you can let me know too.
So with that, thanks.
[audience applauding]
- My name is Cindy Becker.
I work for the Southern Driftless Grasslands,
which is a partnership that is coordinated
through a number of agencies down in southwest Wisconsin.
I am housed at the Driftless Area Land Conservancy,
which is a nonprofit organization out of Dodgeville.
And the reason why we are doing these two projects together
is that when I first heard of Matt's work in Dane County,
I was immediately drawn to the fact
that there is overlap in the work
that we are trying to accomplish down in southwest Wisconsin.
And there are a lot of things that you'll see
as I give this talk
where we have overlap, not only in the timeframe,
but also in the kind of work that is going on.
So it's very exciting to me.
We are currently embarking on
what we call the Prairie Savanna Project.
And this is a project of a group, as I said earlier,
called the Southern Driftless Grasslands.
The partnership is conservation agencies,
educational organizations, land trusts, and landowners.
And I'm very excited that they've decided
to embrace this project as one of its primary goals
because I've been working in prairie and savanna remnants
my whole life.
I started out in Missouri, where we call them glades,
and then I got a chance to work in the Great Plains
where there's vast amounts of prairie left.
And I moved up here and I found on my own property,
that I was stewarding at the time, a remnant,
which I didn't even know there were such things
here in this area.
And so it really stirred for me.
For the last 15 years, I've been really searching
and engaged in trying to find more ways
to research and learn about these special places
in our space.
And so at today's talk,
I wanna first talk about this region,
particularly southwest Wisconsin and its human history.
And then what is actually a prairie remnant?
What is a savanna remnant?
And then finally, end with the Prairie Savanna Project.
So when you look at this space on this slide,
you could really be anywhere.
You could be in the Dakotas, you could be in Nebraska,
but this is actually a view scape from southwest Wisconsin
actually called Mounds View Grasslands,
which is located in Iowa County.
This is a region where prairie and savanna
once blanketed this entire space.
And we are a part of the Driftless area.
We are down in the southern part of the Driftless area,
which goes down into Iowa and over,
well, actually down into Illinois and over into Iowa,
is flatter and more broad,
has a broader landscape than further north,
where you have highly dissected hills.
So this area is a lot more conducive
to this broad prairie landscape
than you'd find up in the northern part
of the Driftless area.
And this is actually, we call this,
when we look at the 1880s, I'm sorry,
the early 1800s map in terms of tribal territories,
this is the home of the Ho-Chunk and the Potawatomi.
But when I look back further into the records,
particularly using a wonderful website
called nativelands.org,
I find mention of the Sauk, the Fox,
the Kickapoo, and Myaamia.
Many of these tribes I don't know much about.
And so clearly there's a lot that we have to learn,
and I have to learn, about these people
that the impact of these generations of people
that lived on, traveled through, and managed this landscape.
And the one thing that comes to me over and over again
is that this human history before European settlement,
it is a history of fire.
And so this map that we have,
you'll see this referred to a lot when you have talks
about prairie and savanna,
and also looking at the historic vegetation type
that covered this area prior to European settlement.
We use this map of vegetation of Wisconsin
in the mid-1800s from Finley, which was put together in 1976.
And although this is small,
I'm gonna highlight this one area,
which is where I'm talking about.
When you look at the color codes, we have prairie, brush,
oak, oak openings.
And again, going back to what Matt was saying
about what he saw in Dane County by looking at those old maps,
it is one in the same story.
As these travelers, we got this information,
similar to what he was saying, is that as they went through,
they had to take meticulous notes of what they were seeing.
And so it's from that information
that we can paint a picture
of what the plant communities were prior to us,
prior to settlement into the region.
And I just imagine that very detailed map that Matt showed
of all the points that had the oaks
of the different species,
this flowery script is what that comes from.
So a lot of people have spent hours of time
trying to go through this and make sense of it,
but this is the way
that we used to document this information.
So you'll see B-oak is for black oak,
BR-oak is for bur oak, bur oak, bur oak,
bur and white oak, prairie.
This is, again, this was taken from southwest Dane County,
so it's very much connected to the work
that Matt was showing earlier.
Many of these are probably on that legacy tree document.
And so oak and prairie habitats,
they are created and maintained by fire.
And over the years, researchers from many different angles
have formulated the frequency--
have tried to formulate the frequency of fire in the region.
And this has required sleuthing into historical documents,
whether they're notes from early settlers
who were in the area
and they were scribing when the large fire came towards them
and they had to, you know, find cover.
We have many different ways that we can see that
from those early transcribed records.
But if we're trying to actually look at the science
of fire on the landscape, we look to the land itself.
And so researchers will go to places
where they find these heritage or legacy trees,
or where they find pockets of prairies still remaining,
and they look for burn scars.
They look for trees that either are standing
or are dead on the ground,
and they take slices and they use very, you know,
specific technology to actually identify the periodicity
of those fires in the wood.
And they can use wood that's buried in streams.
They actually also use charcoal sediment
that's buried in ponds or lakes.
And from that, they can put together a depiction
or a history of the fire in the area.
We know that in southwest Wisconsin, they now say
that fires existed every three to five years on average.
So when we think about today and where we are,
it's a big difference between what was and what is
in maintaining these special places.
This is a picture of a property.
The landowners believe in fire,
and they burn nearly annually for the last 20, 25 years.
And this picture was taken last year.
So you can see the openness of that land.
They have dry prairie, they have savanna,
they have wet meadow, sedge meadow, wet-mesic prairie,
and they're all responding very favorably.
And as they do it, they're seeing more and more
of these native species come up,
including a lot of rare and endangered species.
And so why did people burn?
You know, we would think that that would be stressful
and not really something we'd wanna do.
You know, we think of running away from fire.
But when you think about life without a Walmart
or a Trader Joe's or, you know,
those places that we can get food,
these areas and, oh, it's pretty washed out.
But these were really important spots,
not only for food resources, but also I think about...
I think about dead, downed wood.
If you were trying to start a cooking fire,
you wouldn't be lugging over a large log over to your fire.
You'd be looking for small twigs.
And the only way they'd have that
when they came back into an area
was if there was dead wood on the ground
that they could use.
So for that purpose, and then also for the new growth
that brought in a lot of wildlife to the area.
And also species like this, this is a wild onion.
These were, you know, that new growth
and those food sources and medicine
were integral to their survival.
So any strategy they had for increasing abundance
of what they needed, those were valued and utilized.
And here is a depiction of the cycle
of a fire-dependent system.
We know that prairies are one of the rarest
and most diverse ecosystems in the world.
These prairies are dominated by perennial grasses,
and those are grasses that live multiple years
and have more of a clump growth way of growing
so that they allow for small micro-habitat spaces
for small seeds to get into and grow in.
So it allows for a lot of diversity in a small area.
Grasses make up 50% to 95% of a prairie's vegetation.
But within that, in those interstitial spaces,
are a large variety of sedges and flowering plants.
And these prairies, you can find them on dry sites,
you can find them on wet sites,
rocky to sandy to silty clay, no matter the type.
So soil type or location.
The most important thing that we've realized over the years
is that without fire or some other kind
of periodic disturbance, they will just fill in with trees.
And so here's, you know, again, this depiction of the time,
pre-settlement, in terms of a map,
and we know the way that these tribal,
well, that tribal groups would utilize their land.
And after that, we started to think about,
we came into the area in the 1830s for various reasons,
some of those Matt mentioned earlier,
and with that came a cessation of fire.
And it was replaced with the current working landscape
that we live in today.
We have working lands,
wonderful, amazing, productive farms, roads, and houses.
And yet what that has also meant
is those large expanses of prairie have been reduced
to these small pockets.
And these little tiny spaces
that still harbor the diversity of those early prairies,
we call them prairie remnants.
And they're remnants of the past,
that's why we use that term.
However, I'd also advocate that we call them banks.
They're prairie banks because they're banks of diversity.
They're banks of flowers, of diversity of insects
and mammals and birds.
And so today, when you think about what is left,
we have .01% left of that original vegetation alive today.
And they're all found in these small spaces.
And instead of that being depressing,
which there are times in my career that
that is very depressing, I've decided to find hope,
and find hope in the fact that these small pockets
are embedded sometimes within larger grass landscapes.
And these small pockets do still hold that diversity.
And so for example,
we have the federally-listed prairie bush clover
can be found in these small remnants.
This is a species that is extremely hard to find
and you have to have a trained eye for it,
but it's like a child finding candy when you do,
if you're [laughs] a plant geek like I am.
We have the rusty-patched bumble bee
that utilizes these spaces.
And we have a species called the regal fritillary,
which is state-listed.
And this particular butterfly needs these wide open spaces
of grassland to survive,
but it also has to have its host plant, which is a violet.
So without these remnants that have the violets
and the open grass around it, it won't survive.
So here's just another example of a connection
between a prairie-dependent insect
that we need these to survive on the landscape.
And you can't talk about this without talking about
the beautiful monarch.
And all of the attention that's been brought to it
has done a lot to increase the amount of planted prairie
on the landscape, which is really important.
But again, those planted prairies are nothing
compared to the diversity that's found in these remnants.
And with that said, here's an example
of a study that was done back in 2008.
So a little aged, but still is active in what it has.
This study, which was of 71 square meter plots,
and a one square meter, if you think about it,
is about three feet by three feet square.
So if you put that on the ground,
you think of any place in your world around you
that you can find 59 species, I don't think we can.
It's in these remnants that that still exists.
So the more that we can do to protect these, again,
I'll just be like a broken record.
We need to do it. [laughs]
And on the other side of the spectrum,
part of this oak prairie continuum is oak savanna.
And a lot of us in, you know,
we call this Midwest old-growth forests.
They're characterized by this two-tier system
where you have large spreading trees on the overstory,
a lack of brush in the understory,
and a diverse expanse of prairies and prairie grasses
and flowers in the understory.
And the diversity here comes from the variety
of light conditions that you find in these systems
because you'll have areas that are really dark
and dense under the oak trees.
Plus you'll have open spaces in between those trees
where it's bright and sunny.
So you have a variety of light conditions
and environmental opportunity for different plants.
In some of the species that use this,
this is a state species of concern.
This is called the redheaded woodpecker.
We also have the ornate box turtle.
Those particularly like sandy oak savannas.
And then the eastern pips--
I'm gonna say it wrong, pipstrelle.
Pipistrelle, which is a little tiny bat
that likes to live in the bark of the oaks
and the hickory trees that are in these systems.
So I'm gonna move on to the project itself.
Two years ago, I was able to,
I took the chance to attend a Natural Areas Conference
field trip to western Minnesota.
And I tell you, Minnesota has a hands up on us on this stand
because they already have in place
what they call the Minnesota Prairie Bank Program.
And this, if you look at this map closely,
and I'm hoping that you can see the important thing
that I wanna point out, is that they've realized
that as they mapped where the prairies were
across the western part of their state,
they began to develop corridors
and ways that they could add in planted prairie
to create insect migratory corridors for them,
almost like pearls, so that they could travel.
And it put a seed in my head, "Why are we not doing this
"where we have in a similar fashion
the same kind of small remnants throughout our landscape?"
And so with that in my mind, I came back
and I brought it to the partners.
And there have been many, many people studying
and researching these prairies in our area,
going back to the 1970s where Matt said
that there was a push to identify the legacy trees
in the Dane County area.
Around that same time, prairies became of utmost interest
to a lot of ecologists in the, you know,
across the state, but primarily in southwest Wisconsin.
And there was a push,
and I have hand maps, we have all of these different ways
that this information has been collected over the years.
Around that same time,
a group called the Prairie Enthusiasts got together
as a grassroots movement.
And that started with a small group of people that said,
"We need to protect these prairies across this area."
And it's now turned into a four state,
I think there are chapters in Minnesota,
Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin
that are active in the Prairie Enthusiasts today.
So if you look at this map, this is a combination
of a number of different projects,
some of them extensive in terms of the amount of time
that people have been documenting these prairies,
and others with a very intensive effort in 2010
that was done to identify where potential remnants could be.
And so we have this, all of those dots on that slide
are places where we think there are prairies.
Many of them have been verified, but about 60% of them have not.
So where we have these,
we think there are about 600 remnants across this land,
but we really haven't had an intense effort
that we're using the same information
to document what they look like, what is their current condition,
and also how we can restore, what is needed to restore them.
And as an example, here in Dane County,
this is Perry Township,
which is located in the southwest corner of Dane County.
All of those areas that are outlined in blue,
some are very small, some are much larger.
Those are all the prairie and savanna remnants
that we are trying to access.
Now, we have to realize that 97% of the land
in southwest Wisconsin is private.
So in order to even get into Dane County,
these greater than 250 remnants,
that meant calling and contacting about 150 landowners.
And so we decided that we just were gonna try,
and so we started with Dane County
and we sent everyone this cool postcard.
"Your property could be hiding something special."
And we thought for sure we were gonna get a lot of people
writing back to us like, "Absolutely, come check it out,"
you know, "Come to our land."
And we did have a good turnout.
2023 was our inaugural launch.
We had a couple bumps and, you know, challenges
in figuring out how to do this because we are asking people
that we can get on their property.
That means some folks might have cattle out in the field
that we have to collaborate with them to make sure that
[laughs] we're not in the same pasture with a bull,
or they're a little bit more private
and they don't want people on their property.
So we reached out and we had 22 landowners
allow us access to their property.
And we were able, using a very standardized sheet
that included input from the DNR
and from the Prairie Enthusiasts and other colleagues,
to grade their current condition and restoration potential.
And then with this, and also I reached out
to all of the many contractors who work in the area
who are passionate about prairie and savanna.
Many of those companies are here at this expo today.
With their input, we were able to update the status
on over 70 remnants this year in Dane County.
Now, we have a lot more work we need to do
just in Dane County,
so I'm envisioning for us to get through
the entire area that we want,
it's gonna be about a seven-year process,
and that's why we are hoping
that we can get other people involved. [laughs]
And this information is not just so that we have this,
you know, so we can be like,
"Wow, you know, we can just tout how much is in this area."
That's not what this is about.
The goal of this project is very similar
to the Minnesota Prairie Bank Program.
The more we know, the more we can advocate
for cost-share to be brought in the area.
The more we can help landowners do the work that's needed
to keep those in good condition.
And that could include bringing roving crews into the area
that sign up to work with landowners
to burn their prairies or to do brush work.
Like, we have a lot of ideas that we're thinking through
to make this happen.
And all landowners that have allowed us access
to their property, they receive a report
and they also receive a follow-up
so that we can talk to them about cost-share
and options for restoration.
And we know this works
because we've done a lot of work in other,
you know, whether it's savanna and prairie restoration,
you know, with outside of this project vision,
but also wetland habitat work,
also helping people with their CRP plantings,
which is conservation reserve programs,
which are prairie plantings.
We know that when we visit with a landowner,
they learn more, they get more engaged,
and they want to do something
'cause, you know, information is priceless.
So we really hope that as we do more work with landowners
as part of this project,
we will also be able to initiate more work
on these small remnants.
And so how people can help,
we are going to set up a system
so that you can report a prairie or savanna that you know,
whether it's along a roadside,
whether it's along a railroad line,
that's a really great place for these to show up.
You can have an assessment of a prairie or savanna remnant
on your own land.
It's a free service,
and we want more and more people to use that.
You can invest in restoration through learning and doing.
There are a lot of groups out there who do this work
and welcome your volunteer help.
This was given to me by the Prairie Enthusiasts
of one of their work days,
and here is the after-effect of that.
This is now set up to do some burning into,
you know, moving forward.
And as a plug for fire and the Prescribed Fire Council,
which is really advocating for this,
we need to make good fire [laughs] across this landscape.
Let's restore fire to the land
and restore our natural heritage.
So there's two organizations
that are involved in this right now,
and I hope to have more into the future.
In terms of people that you can be connected to
to get that free site visit.
And the area that's outlined in red,
that's where the Southern Driftless Grasslands is housed.
And so you'd be contacting me, and I'd be happy to come out
and do a site visit on your property as well.
And that's also shown in the Prairie Enthusiasts
so that you can contact those,
but you can also come, you know, give us a call
and they're one of our partners.
But here are all the other chapters
for the Prairie Enthusiasts
that they would welcome your call
and would find a way to set up for you to have a visit
so we can get that information
and start talking about ways to manage your prairie.
And down here on the bottom
are all of the partners that are involved
in the Southern Driftless Grasslands partnership.
And I work for the Driftless Area Land Conservancy,
so I'm gonna be at that booth, which is booth 303,
and we have some more information there.
And also you can contact me at my email
or also visit our website.
And with that,
I say thank you very much for listening.
[audience applauding]