At the Litzsinger Road Ecology Center (LREC), we are in the process of restoring approximately 14 acres of degraded mesic to wet-mesic bottomland woodland. Mesic bottomland woodlands occur along the level or gradually sloping ground of stream or river floodplains and have moderately well drained soils that are wet for part of the year, while wet-mesic bottomland woodlands often have some ponding. LREC has a mixture of these systems. Vegetation in these systems is adapted to occasional flooding and fire and has an open structure with few understory species and 50–80% canopy cover. Characteristic trees include: hackberry, white oak, bur oak, shellbark hickory, swamp white oak, persimmon, cottonwood, pecan, and pin oak. Characteristic ground layer species include: black snakeroot, wood reed grass, poison ivy, wood nettle, giant cane, bluebells, white trout lily, pale violet, spiderwort, white anemone, sedges, and false rue anemone.

If you know your plants well, you’ll realize that most of these species are NOT currently present at LREC. In fact, our dominant tree species currently are: box elder, hackberry, and sycamore with the abundantly dominant ground layer species: vining euonymus and wood nettle. While the woodland at LREC was never plowed (unlike the prairie at LREC), many other problems are present: invasive exotic species are the dominant species, the hydrology has been altered by urban development, the area has been logged, and fire has been suppressed. These changes have led to a system which does not contain many of the tree species which would have been formerly dominant here due to logging and fire suppression and characteristic native ground layer species are present in very low abundance due to exotic species invasion, flash flooding, and fire suppression.

To restore the native ground layer, we are controlling the vining euonymus by cutting and painting vines with herbicide that are growing up trees, spraying foliar herbicide on plants growing along the ground, and pulling it up in small, isolated areas. An experiment conducted at LREC and Ruth Park Woods in University City, MO showed that the best time to spray vining euonymus with foliar herbicide is in the early fall. We will be spraying some of the euonymus in the woodland in early fall and hope to follow the spraying with a burn to clear the leaf litter so that we can spread native ground layer seed around in more areas of the woodland. We are also planting trees that are adapted to mesic to wet-mesic woodlands in the woodland and along the creek banks. Through active management efforts, we hope that these trees will one day become the dominant canopy species there.

A 2004 survey of 78 plots in the woodland showed that of 59 ground layer plant species found there 85% of them are native plant species. However, vining euonymus was present in over 75% of these plots and on average, covered more area in the plots than any other species surveyed. The next most common species were Virginia wild rye, occurring in 27% of the plots, and wood nettle, occurring in 50% of the plots. Other native species were much less common. Over time, the restoration projects we are conducting should have a positive impact on the composition of this area. We have recorded 98 species of birds in the prairie and woodland at LREC, 18 species of mammals, 10 species of amphibians, and 23 species of reptiles (See Research for complete lists).