Ecological Restoration

Diversifying Forest Plantations in the Great Lakes Region

Establishing conifer plantations was a common land-use practice to revegetate abandoned agricultural and derelict lands in the U.S. Great Lakes states in the early and mid-1900s.  With shifting timber markets and management priorities, there is now keen interest by land management agencies to diversify forest plantations or replace them with natural ecosystems.  In this project with Metroparks Toledo, Natural Resource Conservation LLC developed and implemented monitoring strategies and analyzed 14 years of data on the effectiveness of management strategies for ecosystem restoration in northwestern Ohio conifer plantations.  The project was highly successful.  For example, native plants important to pollinators were 24 times more abundant in managed plantations compared to plantations where no management occurred. 

Repeat photos from unmanaged (left) and managed plantations (middle, right).

The project has helped stimulate further successful management actions.  It has also resulted in multiple publications with Metroparks Toledo co-authors, such as:

Abella, S.R., T.A. Schetter, and T.L. Walters. 2017. Restoring and conserving rare native ecosystems: a 14-year plantation removal experiment. Biological Conservation 212:265-273.