- Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for the UW-Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it's my pleasure to introduce to you Brad Herrick from the UW-Madison Arboretum. He's going to be here to talk about a legacy of research in ecological restoration at the Arb. For those of us who live here in the Madison area, it seems like the Arboretum has always been there, but it hasn't. Once upon a time it was just land, and at one point it was a run-down farm. So it's always a good idea to keep in mind some of the great things that are here are here because people took big risks and made big investments long ago and we enjoy them and so will our children and grandchildren. Brad was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and then he moved to Minnesota. And he still cheers for a team other than the Packers...  [audience laughing]  Even though he went to high school at Eau Claire Memorial High School in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Then he went to undergraduate at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and studied biology. Then he got his master's degree in environmental science at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay. About 10 years ago, in 2007, he came to the Arboretum, and tonight he gets to talk to us about this wonderful legacy going back eight or more decades. Please join me in welcoming Brad Herrick to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab.  [audience applauding]   - Thank you, Tom. Thanks everyone for being here tonight. So a legacy of research in ecological restoration is a pretty big topic to try and squeeze into a one-hour presentation. So this could probably be a series of lectures or a semester seminar. I'm going to do my best to scrunch it down into an hour, and so for those of you who are familiar with the Arboretum, maybe know some of the history, you'll notice big gaps in my timeline, especially with the research and restoration part. So the questions obviously at the end, I'll be able to hopefully to fill in the gaps for you. But we're going to move right along on the timeline, and a lot of what I'm going to be talking about tonight is centered around Curtis Prairie, which is our flagship prairie at the Arboretum. It's considered the oldest restored prairie in the world. It's kind of what we're known for. And a lot of the early research and restoration happened at that location. That's kind of what I'm going to focus on, and then I'll bring us all the way up to today and I'll talk about kind of what our goals for research and restoration are. I like to share this slide when I give talks like this because it gives a nice overview of the landscape around the Arboretum. So here, so we're right in here somewhere in downtown campus. Capitol's over here. The Arboretum is about four miles, as the crow flies, south of us. This is Lake Wingra, Nakoma Golf Course here. And so the Arboretum is really nestled in the city of Madison; it's a very urban area. It's a green space and an urban area. Even the Beltline actually dissects the Arboretum. There's a 200-acre parcel here, you can't see all of it, it goes out of the screen, called the Grady Tract. That used to be connected to the Arboretum, but in the '50s, when that Beltline went in, it went right through. And so we lost some pines and had some increased fragmentation there. So a lot of our restoration and our research kind of is either informed or tries to answer questions about how urbanization affects the landscape. And you'll hear that theme kind of throughout my talk tonight. A lot of people don't realize that besides the 1200 acres of woodlands, oak savanna, prairie, and wetlands at the Arboretum here in Madison, we also do research and manage about 500 acres of what we call outlying properties. So these are all remnant piece  - Yes, that's right. There are trails through the prairie, so you can definitely enjoy it. So now I want to jump forward another decade or so to our next ecologist, Dr. Virginia Kline. And she was the ecologist from 1975 to 1996. And she was a prairie ecologist, also trained here in the botany department. A prairie ecologist and an oak savanna expert. And she did a lot of research at the Arboretum, but I want to share with you one of her really important projects and, again, that we kind of take for granted now but people just didn't really know at the time how to deal with some of these species. So she wrote a paper called, The Response of Melilotus alba, which is white sweet clover, many of you are familiar probably, to burning and mowing treatments. So what had happened when we started burning the prairie in the '40s, we kind of got stuck in a rut. We kind of burned it at the same time every year, usually early spring. And what happened was that this schedule ended up promoting this invasive forb. So sweet clover is a biennial, meaning that it has a two-year life cycle. So the first year it sends up basil leaves, so just little leaves, and then those leaves die back. The next year it sends up a flowering stalk, and then produces flowers and seeds. And so what was happening is that they were stimulating that plant to germinate in the spring with these fires, and it might set them back but then they would have time later in that same year to send up a flowering stalk and, with no disturbance, they would just drop seeds everywhere. And they kept doing this over and over again, and Curtis Prairie was becoming a sweet clover field. And so Dr. Kline came up with an experiment. And basically found that if you change the timing of your burns, you can drastically reduce sweet clover or any biennial because what happens is that when you do an early spring burn, like I said, it actually won't kill the plant, it'll set it back but it'll allow it to continue growing later on that year. The following year, you wait awhile, wait until it starts to bloom, and then before it sets seed, you send a fire through and you end up killing the plant. And since they're biennial, that's the end of their lifespan. If you do that a few years in a row, you're going to deplete the seed bank very quickly. So she found that burning was the ticket. Mowing also worked but it wasn't quite as good as burning. And burning was much less effort. The other contribution that she made, she made many contributions, but one of the most important ones was that she wrote a comprehensive land management plan for the Arboretum. And we refer to it as the Kline Plan. It was written in 1992. And it basically described all of the communities at the Arboretum, and it talked about what the vegetation was at the time of the writing and what the goals for each community should be and how to achieve them. And it was great, and we frankly still use a lot of it today. But it is almost 30 years old now, and things have changed. And so we're in the process right now updating this land management plan because we have new challenges, frankly. Climate change obviously is a big one. Storm water is probably the most important one for us. We have a lot of storm water issues being sort of at the bottom of the Lake Wingra watershed. A lot of the water coming in from the surrounding landscape comes through the Arboretum at some point. We have new pest species, obviously. Emerald ash borer, garlic mustard, all these new things. Garlic mustard is not new. Generally urban impacts. You saw that first map of neighborhoods all around the Arboretum, businesses, residential areas, the Beltline. We have these novel conditions. These are areas that have been under buckthorn cover for 50 years, for example, and haven't been restored because of whatever reason, resources probably. You know, how is that community that is not native to Wisconsin, how has that changed the soil structure? How has it changed hydrology? How has it changed nutrient dynamics in the soil? If we remove buckthorn, can we a