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| After months of effort, we have finally accomplished a full drawdown on the main Tower Marsh. This image shows the ~half of the ~80-acres that we hope will evolve into a broad diversity of desirable wetland vegetation. It's been decades since this has been done though, so it's a "fingers crossed" experiment. |
For two years now, Roy and I have been using the term "clean slate" to describe the starting point that we face -- or in some cases strife for -- with our management units when we contemplate restoration activities. While it seems somewhat counterintuitive, the broad expanse of mud depicted in the image above is about as "clean" of a slate as we can get on our property.
In reality, we don't ever have the luxury of starting fresh. All of the land targeted for restoration has a history, and each individual target area confined by earthen dikes ("management unit") has its own specific past, present, and future. Our goal is to help provide environmental circumstances that promote the most ecologically desirable future. And it all starts with water (or in some cases, the lack thereof) and plants. As I've discussed in previous posts, many of our units were dominated by invasive species at one time or another over the last several decades. Some were dominated when we took possession of the property in 2015.
Others, like the "South Tower" unit pictured above have had enough water on them long enough that there isn't much growing. Two to three feet of standing water tends to limit emergent vegetation, especially if the water levels are sustained. And if the water tends to be murky (like ours was), even submergent vegetation (below the water level) tends to be limited.
But every unit has a "seed bed," a residual reservoir of plant seeds made up of several to many species -- deposited over years and even decades -- that resides in the shallow surface "mud" that in several cases, we have now exposed. The gamble is what is that seed composition, and what can we trigger to germinate?
In the case of last year's effort in the West Rest Pond, we weren't confident that we'd like what we'd see in the seed bed, so we flew in millet to help promote desirable plants (read more here, if you haven't already, to better understand how we try to stack the deck using millet). We are implementing a similar tactic on the far East Dinky Marsh because we are concerned there may be high percentages of Phragmites and loosestrife seed (reminder: both "bad guys").
But the Tower is a roll of the dice we are willing to entertain. Only time will tell if the gamble will pay off. I'll get more into the impacts of drawdown as we witness what unfolds.
P.S. The only plant material visible in the image above is a small amount of aquatic smartweed in the foreground, the ring of Phragmites that we are allowing to grow on the far dikes to help keep soils stabilized (dark green plant in the background), and the bright green millet (background, but in front of Phrag) that we flew in a few weeks back to try to minimize the spread of Phragmites from the surrounding dikes. It is still short, but it is coming on well.