Invasives Beware!

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Meet in the Nature Center at 9 a.m. on the third Saturday of every month. Participants need to wear closed-toed shoes and bring their own gloves. Long pants, a hat, and a refillable water bottle are recommended.

One of our goals at Jones Park is to return the forest to its native state in order to support the native wildlife. Historically this area was a mix of prairies and woodlands with a more open understory. This ecosystem is disturbance dependent, which at one time would have been provided by bison grazing and fires caused by either lightning, indigenous people, or settlers. The exclusion of these disturbances has created unregulated growth of invasive plant species. These choke out native trees and grasses. For example, dogwood trees do not do well in areas where there is competition for resources. As a result, there are only two Flowering Dogwood trees (aka Eastern Dogwood) naturally occurring in Jones Park.

By manually removing the overgrown and non-native plants, we can recreate the effect of natural disturbances like grazing and fire. This allows for regeneration of the historical understory and mid-story vegetation, which can then be supported by planting of additional native trees. Increasing native plant diversity leads to an increase in the diversity of insect species, which then results in an increase in the diversity of birds and small mammals, too.