Garry oak meadow restoration

The Pacific Northwest is home to the beautiful and unique meadow communities associated with Garry oak (Quercus garryana) and other oak species. These ecosystems have evolved with the care and management of Indigenous communities, and are breathtaking in their species diversity and cultural importance. More than 95% of the historical range has been lost due to land conversion, and the remaining patches are threatened by fragmentation, the loss of traditional fire management practices, a suite of aggressive invasive species, over-browsing, and high pressures of recreational use. Restoration science and practice in these systems is wide-spread, knowledgeable, and still facing many challenges. Our lab is excited to contribute by exploring landscape context of the remaining meadows, ecosystem function and trait-based restoration tools, and plant-soil interactions in restoration success.

One of our first projects is to create an updated, comprehensive map of Garry oak meadow patches on Southern Vancouver Island. This is a combined map of several primary data sources, including the BC Sensitive Ecosystem Inventory, Lea’s 2002 Garry oak ecosystem map, and Lilley’s 2007 remnant oak savanna mapping. Additional meadow patches were delineated based on indicator species occurrences and visually estimated locations that were field checked.

We need your help!  This map is incomplete, and we are looking for community feedback to fill in some of the gaps. If you, or anyone you know, has meadow locations that we have not captured, please email the lab PI and add your knowledge to this effort.

Native grassland restoration

From the vanishing prairies of Texas to the threatened savannas under Garry oak canopies in British Columbia, grass-dominated ecosystems are complex, diverse, and fascinating. These systems are often heavily used. Be it for grazing, haying, trail riding, or agriculture, they represent the intersection of human dominated landscapes and wild biodiversity values. Our research focuses on improving degraded grassland regions through active restoration management and collaborative planning in multi-use landscapes.

Chatfield Farms Experimental Prairie Restoration

In partnership with Denver Botanic Gardens Chatfield Farms (located in Denver, Colorado, USA), we are implementing a staged restoration experiment to examine the resilience of a degraded rangeland state and the management choices that can push it back towards a functional, diverse grassland community. We are testing the intensity of disturbance required to 'reset' the system paired with questions about how species selection, seeding methods, and seed preparation drive restoration outcomes.

Collaborators on the project include the Suding and Schmidt Labs at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Science and Research Team at the Denver Botanic Gardens, and the University of Denver. Together, we are assessing soil health and microbial response, invertebrate community development, and vegetation community trajectories,.

The project was launched with the support of the USDA NIFA fellowship program.

The Global Arid Zone Project
(GAZP)

Restoration actions in drylands span a wide variety of methods and strategies. As one of the largest restoration database efforts globally, GAZP finds the common threads between projects globally and helps us understand which methods work, where, why, and who is implementing them. This effort is pivotal to sharing knowledge and growing that knowledge together as a restoration community.

For more information, please see the GAZP homepage. We are also collaborating with the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research on our sister project, the Global Restore Project, working to expand the scope of the database to mesic systems.