Virginia Wildlife Habitat Cooperative Spring 2020 Project Highlights

Fire is critical to enhancement of biodiversity. To provide a greater window of opportunity for the use of fire to enhance our wildlife projects, we have been experimenting with mechanical burners at the Perdue Experimental Station. The station is a 6 acre floodplain where we have been testing and evaluating floodplain landscapes for better riparian resiliency since 2015.

Here we have the second year of a Piedmont Upland project coming in. The flush of volunteer Asters is notable and not unexpected and nevertheless sort of unreal to comprehend as this time last year this field was full of Foxtail with not an Aster in sight. Working for years in this area, we have seen this second year phenomena before and modified our species mix expecting this to occur.

We are grateful to this landowners that is letting us subdivide 5 acres of rolling landscape directly behind their estate to employ roundup free strategies to slowly increase the percentage of warm season grasses and forbs in what had been an old orchard grass field. This image shows site preparation for transition from Broomsedge to other later succession grassland species and also controlling invasives through the use of hemp and vetches.

Owen took this great picture of the drainage ditch of one of our commercial clients. Can you spot the wildlife in ACP of the image? Now we know that clover is not a native plant, but we love it nonetheless and use it in all kinds of ways in our projects.

From the same commercial site – this is a stormwater detention basin. Still lots of issues to deal with here in the coming years in terms of recruitment of warm season grasses on the steep slopes but still biodiversity has increased substantially just in one year.

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