Groundcover Restoration in Forests of the Southeastern United States

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Chapter 1: Planning a Restoration Projectthe budget required for individual restoration projectsvaries widely according to the activities required. Forexample, projects that involve herbicide applications,and/or seeding and planting will cost more than thosethat simply involve tree harvest, thinning and/or burning.Many restorationists suggest that a minimum of 5 yearsof funding be set aside for any project to have a bufferagainst set-backs and delays. Others suggest that fundingbe secured for a much longer timeframe. Some typesof management, such as prescribed fire and removal ofinvasive exotic species, will need to be implemented onthe restoration site as long as the site exists, requiring aninvestment of time and funds in perpetuity. Restorationis a long-term commitment that should not be initiatedif future availability of financial resources is highlyuncertain.Prior to the initiation of any restoration activities, carefulconsideration should be given to the identification of thefollowing items:• Funding sources• Labor availability• Equipment• Biotic resourcesIf the availability of any of these resources is limited oruncertain, your proposed restoration project may not befeasible.4. Identify the reference community for your site.The goal of a restoration project would ideally be torestore the previously intact ecosystem that has beenlost from that site. Unfortunately, this information isoften unavailable for sites that have been impacted forlong periods of time, and in other cases the informationthat is available is not sufficient to fully characterize therestoration goals. Egan and Howell (2001) have created auseful key to identify reference information that can beused to determine the potential composition, structureand function for a restoration site in situations where thatinformation is missing. In short, when historical data ismissing and there is no intact habitat on the restorationsite, off-site locations, known as “reference sites”, thatmatch the conditions and geography of the restorationsite are used to gain baseline data. A complete descriptionof this methodology is given in the section of this manualentitled “Selecting Reference Sites” (see Chapter 2).5. Determine which restoration activities are necessary toreach the restoration goals you set for your site.Restorationists should conduct site assessments atreference sites and at the sites to be restored, and thencompare the ecological attributes between the sitesin order to prioritize which attributes need to be andcan be addressed. During this process, considerationshould be given to previous research in the communitybeing restored. The activities required for groundcoverrestoration can be determined using informationavailable in this manual, from the literature, and bycontacting the people who are active in your specifichabitat or geographic area. Specific restoration activitiesthat are discussed in this manual are:• Mechanical site preparation• Chemical site preparation• Cutting/thinning canopy or midstory trees• Prescribed fire• Outplanting• Direct seedingEach of these techniques can be used alone or incombination with others.6. Develop a detailed project schedule and be prepared tochange it.Many of the activities required for groundcoverrestoration need to be timed appropriately. Therefore,planning out a detailed schedule of activities that will beneeded each season is an essential ingredient to success.However, chaos is real. Be aware that the climate, thecontractors, and the equipment are not under yourcomplete control. By the time you complete a restorationproject, there will likely be many activities that youneeded to do that you didn’t plan for initially. The abilityto change course in response to unplanned results is partof adaptive management. Adaptive management is anapproach to resource management which emphasizesmonitoring the effects of management actions with theintention of changing management tactics if it becomesapparent that actions are not meeting the originalobjectives. In the realm of restoration, this means thatthe effects of restoration activities are monitored, anddifferent actions are implemented if it becomes apparentthat site conditions are not changing along the trajectorydesired. This approach increases efficiency and alsoincreases chances of success in the long-term.In practice, adaptive management involves “treatingmanagement and policy decisions that result inmanagement as large experiments that test predictionsand assumptions in management plans, and then usingthe results to revise and improve the plans.” (TNC 1998).| 12 |
Chapter 1: Planning a Restoration ProjectBasically, adaptive management is recommended as away to proactively deal with uncertainty: if you view yourrestoration projects as experiments, you can learn fromyour results so that your next restoration efforts are moresuccessful and more efficient than previous attempts.Restorationists use adaptive management to acknowledgethe need for additional restoration activities in responseto unexpected or unplanned results of previousmanagement decisions. Some examples of unexpectedconditions that may be encountered during the course ofa restoration project are:• Lack or overabundance of seed bank species• Drought/flood and loss of seedlings/planting• Invasive species introduced by equipment or seed• Incomplete or patchy prescribed firesDeveloping a descriptive list of desired future conditionsat the beginning of a project and then maintaining anattitude of flexibility in exactly how those conditions willbe created is essential to restoration success.7. Monitor.The best way to monitor the success of your groundcoverrestoration project is through periodic vegetationsampling. Using cover and diversity estimates tocompare your site to the reference sites through timewill help document the direction and magnitude ofrestoration progress. Monitoring is absolutely essentialto the identification of which ecosystem componentsare responding to restoration activities in the mannerdesired, and which are not.The use of photostations (same place, same direction)is a quick way to visualize the structural changes invegetation resulting from restoration, but photographswill not provide information on species composition orplant demographics that may be needed to assess successin reaching restoration objectives. If altering the speciescomposition of your site is one of your objectives, thenyour monitoring protocol needs to be set up so that theinformation collected will tell you whether particularspecies are being added or lost from the area. In short,monitoring protocols are not a one-size-fits-all endeavor:they must be tailored to each restoration project so thatthe information obtained helps you determine whetheror not you are meeting your restoration objectives.Groundcover vegetation monitoring at The NatureConservancy’s Disney Wilderness Preserve in Kissimmee, FL.Credits: L. Demetropoulos.the effectiveness of your restoration efforts before youbegin, you will have a much better likelihood of successin the end. Additional information on monitoring ispresented at the end of chapter 2.The steps identified here are very broad. For a checklist withmuch finer detail, the Society for Ecological Restoration(SER) Guidelines for Developing and Managing EcologicalRestoration Projects is an excellent resource (Clewell etal. 2005). The SER International Primer on EcologicalRestoration (SER 2004) gives definitions of terms andconcepts involved in ecological restoration and the FloridaDepartment of Environmental Protection (DEP) providesexcellent information in their manual for restoration onpublic lands. The Florida DEP also provides a worksheetto assist in the determination of whether your site hascharacteristics that would make it suitable for restoration orwhether time and effort would be better spent on anothersite (TNC 1998).Monitoring is fundamental to the adaptive managementapproach discussed in step 6: without monitoring, it isnot possible to learn from previous mistakes. By puttingforth effort to develop a plan for how you will monitor| 13 |
Page 5: Table of ContentsIntroduction .....
Page 9: Part IDesigning and Executing aGrou
Page 15 and 16: Chapter 2Implementing a Restoration
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Page 35 and 36: Chapter 4Important Considerations f
Page 37 and 38: Chapter 5Costs Associated with Grou
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Page 41 and 42: Literature CitedAbrahamson, W. G. a
Page 43 and 44: Literature CitedEgan, D. and E. A.
Page 45 and 46: Literature CitedLeopold, A. 1949. A
Page 48 and 49: Literature CitedTrusty, J. L., and
Page 51 and 52: Chapter 6Location of Groundcover Re
Page 53 and 54: Chapter 6: Location of Groundcover
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Chapter 7: Forested Communities of
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Chapter 7: Forested Communities of
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Groundcover Restoration in Forests of the Southeastern United States

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