Reminisce

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Several summers ago I attended a math-ecology camp.  I consider it one of the best points in my life so far.  The courses were exciting and challenging, the professors supportive and entertaining, the other students were wonderful, and the research station we stayed at was on a beautiful lake.  I’ve kept in touch with many of the people I got to know in the program and jumped at the chance to stay near the research station for a few days this summer.  Even better, I stayed with one of my favorite people from the program.

Many of the evenings my first summer at the research station were spent down at the dock with the other students, sometimes talking over some of the things we’d struggled with during class, but more often just being silly.  Those were definitely some of my favorite times.  I spent just one evening on the dock this summer, reminiscing.  Memories are slippery things, but the place and time of day (as well as the hoards of hungry mosquitoes) brought that first summer back for me.

Getting eaten alive by mosquitoes at sunset

Traveling

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I left Arizona on July 26th.  That happens to be my sister’s birthday.  In all the hurry, I forgot to call her.  Oops.

Since then, I’ve been to Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.  I’ve posted about my trip to the MacCready Reserve already, but I’ve got much more to tell you about.  If you’re lucky, I’ll get it up before I’ve forgotten most of the details.

I head back to Arizona this week.  As wonderful as it’s been to see friends and (some) family and to explore non-desert ecosystems again, I’m anxious to get back home.  The pressure changes of air travel and the region I’ve been traveling in, irregular sleep schedule, and unfamiliar stress of heat and humidity have led to more migraines than I want to think about.

My sister introduced me to Florence & the Machine this week.  You’re probably already familiar, but in case you aren’t:

Prairie Fen

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Also at MacCready Reserve is a prairie fen restoration project. Before I visited the reserve, I had never heard of a prairie fen. That’s pretty sad, because prairie fens are awesome.  Lots of people get excited about them because of their insect diversity, but I was more excited about the plants!

Looking out over the fen

Looking out over the fen with invasive buckthorn visible to the right

First of all, what exactly is a fen?  It’s like a bog in that it’s a pretty soggy freshwater area, but that’s about where the similarity ends.  Bogs get their water straight from rain and tend to be acidic.  Fens get their water through the ground and tend to be alkaline.  This creates HUGE differences in terms of what lives there.

Fen edge

Restored edge of prairie fen. It doesn't look that wet, but three more steps and I would have been knee deep in black mud.

Like the oak savanna also being restored at MacCready Reserve, the fen used to be absolutely covered in invasive buckthorn.  They’ve restored parts of the fen we visited, but areas overrun with buckthorn are still everywhere.  The difference between restored and invaded areas is dramatic.  The restored areas have much higher plant diversity and many more native species, though invasives like purple loosestrife can still be found.

purple loosestrife

Loosestrife- I think it's Lythrum salicaria

Praire fen are globally very rare, but still quite common in the midwest.  Unfortunately, because of human activity, fen won’t survive without human intervention.  You can read more about identifying and restoring fens at this great MSU website.

Oak Savanna

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While I was in Michigan earlier this summer, I went on a tour of the MacCready Reserve where there are multiple research projects and restoration efforts active.  I’m not very familiar at all with midwestern ecosystems, so I was pleased at the opportunity to go on a guided tour with a brand new PhD who’d done her work on the reserve.

Back in the 1930s, oak savanna at the reserve was planted over with pine to harvest later.  However, the trees were planted very densely and unmanaged for decades.  Restoration has involved destroying invasive buckthorn and thinning the spindly pine while leaving enough shade for the newly planted oak  saplings.

Oak Savanna Restoration in Progress

Despite thinning, the pine is still quite dense. The oak saplings are planted in plastic tubes to protect them from deer browse.

Removing buckthorn and keeping it from reestablishing seems to be incredibly labor intensive – and very expensive, but absolutely necessary for restoration.  Oak savanna is now a very rare ecosystem type and is likely to remain so because restoration is so expensive and the benefits are far from immediate and often indirect.

As much as I want to support restoration efforts, I often feel that the areas we restore are too small to do more than serve as a reminder of what we’ve lost.  I also worry that restoration efforts in ecosystems as destroyed as oak savanna are pointless in the face of climate change.  By the time these oaks reach maturity, will Michigan’s climate even be suitable for oak savanna?

Write Like ?

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I’m too busy today to post the usual link list, but not too busy for some serious procrastination.  I discovered a strange and silly tool called “I Write Like” that analyzes your writing, does some fancy statistical thing (nonsense?), and tells you what famous author you write like.

It’s not very consistent.  My results based on several different blog posts:

So, either my word choice and writing style are wildly different in each of these posts, or the tool is very terrible at what it says it does.  Or both.  Regardless, that was a very fun way to avoid my web programming duties for 15 minutes.