Not all Barrens are Wastelands.
by Stuart Steidle, MS student in Geography and Journalism at the University of Oregon
Lakewood Wisconsin’s Pine Barren Restoration Projects
What does it mean to see the forest for the trees when the trees, well, aren’t there? For the Forest Service, this question brings both the past and the future into focus as they work on restoring historically open habitats in a corner of Wisconsin’s North Woods. The signature answer that binds past conditions, present management activities, and future outcomes is: fire.
“We’re trying to emulate nature as much as we can wherever we can in all of these treatments,” Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest silviculturist John Lampereur told me when we met in late April amongst the nascent Pine Barrens that he’s helping restore.
Pine barrens are a globally rare habitat type, and remnants in Wisconsin resemble heaths or savannahs, characterized by diverse shrubs, a grassy base layer, scant canopy, recurrent fire, and – the most exciting part – prolific blueberry patches, albeit not in April!
Myself with John Lampereur (middle) and Scott Linn, enjoying a visit to one expanse in the Lakewood District of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest where they are restoring pine barrens. The backdrop has been logged and the remaining wood masticated, and awaits a burn – or several over time – to help grasses and forbs establish where oak roots are still sprouting. Pine barrens historically hosted only around five trees per acre, Jack Pine and Red Pine in particular. Photo: Tom Brussel
Despite the seasonable shortage in blueberries, my colleague Tom Brussel and I still gorged on the opportunity to walk firsthand with Lampereur and his colleague, Forest Service fire manager Scott Linn, and learn about how they’re restoring this relatively under-appreciated landscape type near Lakewood in northern Wisconsin.
Overcrowded forest stands in the area signal a complicated history marked time and again by conventional, production-oriented evaluation of nature by Europeans eager to plant timber stands where there were none. Unaware of the ecological niche of this open landscape, which hosts numerous native plants and animals, the state’s first surveyors disparaged it in their records.
“You see it in the original public lands survey notes from the 1850’s: ‘landscape barrens,’ ‘burned over barrens,’ ‘scrubland,’ ‘third-rate,’” Lampereur said, quoting from archives he’s read that refer exactly to the sites we walked upon.
At their root the barrens are not conducive to robust timber stands. “You’re standing on 150 feet of sand right now,” Lampereur explained. Still, initiatives began after the Great Depression to target this area for tree planting since farmers had gone broke eking homesteads out of the sandy glacial outwash.
A large mound of sand sits on the road where a badger excavated their den site. The animal residence is a good indicator of the biodiversity that barrens support, both below and above ground. One of the hallmark species of barrens is the sharp tailed grouse – although the Lakewood project likely won’t be large enough a habitat to host this species, a number of other birds and wildlife are likely to find their niche amongst the project’s 800 acres.
The sand is both immediately evident where the pavement ends, but still subtly hidden by vegetation – whether trees or shrubs – thus providing the mixed landscape with a surreal quality from its base.
Lampereur described looking beyond the sand and the overgrown but undernourished forests early in his first visits to the area sixteen years ago, concluding the landscape once knew a lot of fire. Later surveys of scattered charred stumps with Dr. Mike Stambaugh and Dr. Richard Guyette of University of Missouri found acutely frequent fire intervals, some as narrow as six years.
“When you’ve got fire burning across the landscape at 5-6 year intervals, you get a mind’s-eye picture of exactly what kind of stands those create, and they’re nothing at all like what we’re looking at today,” said Lampereur.
Collaborative work and public outreach over the years culminated in a vision of landscape-scale restoration that includes fire as a central component. The expanded boundaries appear to be a working boon for Linn as fire manager.
“For us to apply fire, I’d much rather burn 500 or 1000 acres at a time than 20-acre blocks,” he said, explaining that it distributes the load and impact of technical resources and crews that are required for burns, allowing them to achieve more in their targeted time windows.
The sites we visited instead had been logged, and the ground slash was mechanically chewed up – masticated – to remove more potential fuel and thus ensure low-intensity burns. Initial clearage gives fire a leg up on knocking out persistent oaks that re-sprout with vigor. Lampereur likened the treatments to a one-two-three punch.
Timber harvests – that is, practical clear-cuts, which I’m learning to appreciate in this context – also facilitate ease of handling fire when it comes to burn operations. “We are basically being the hand that selects what stays and what goes,” Linn said, adding, “If we just apply fire, fire is going to do that as a natural process, we’re not going to have that choice.”
Reintroducing fire in a controlled manner also decreases the odds of any future wildfires getting out of hand, complementing fire-wise efforts that Linn oversees throughout the wildland urban interface. Still, the team has put in a lot of work to gain public support since prescribed fire is a novel management technique in the region. Accounting for a public sense of forest aesthetic is also key.
Lampereur, Linn, and colleagues took cues from land managers of the Nature Conservancy and elsewhere in Wisconsin as they removed post-logging “slash” to boost public stakeholder approval. Removing this woody debris before conducting prescribed burns also lessens the heat, preventing scorched portions of soil from attracting invasive plant species, according to Lampereur.
Meanwhile native plants long unseen are already returning. Lampereur and Linn pointed out a grass, little bluestem, that wouldn’t be visible three or four years ago. A botanist colleague of theirs analyzed the seedbed of this plant and others, finding that some native seeds were still viable after 200 years.
“That’s one of the hopes of doing this sort of work – things that have been gone for decades, maybe even a hundred years just spring back to life – ‘surprise!’” Lampereur said, referring to positive cases across the state.
I for one, will be back, no surprise at all, hopefully feasting on blueberries come July.
Between now and then, though, I’ll also be re-visiting to document more of the transitional restoration phases with 360º video equipment. The resulting interactive videos are components in a thesis study on interactivity and science communication.
It’s rewarding to witness the forefront of a relatively novel, albeit well-resourced habitat restoration effort. Lampereur told us that the environmental assessments and social surveys they’ve directly and indirectly built this project around provide baseline assessments that will inform comparative analyses for years. “There aren’t a lot of studies like that […] it’s pretty exciting.”