WOODLAND RESTORATION: AN OVERVIEW

In the fall of 1984, the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered a graduate student seminar on woodland restoration as part of a series of courses dealing with the design, restoration, and management of native plant communities. The participants* included nine students and two faculty with backgrounds in botany, forestry, zoology, biology, and landscape architecture. We were interested in getting a clearer idea of the state of the art of forest restoration, meaning by the term “restoration” and attempt to create natural conditions rather than to establish stands for fiber and timber production. We quickly determined from a preliminary review of the literature that, in contrast to the situation in the field of prairie restoration, for example, systematic discussions of natural woodland restorations were not readily available. We knew of extensive bodies of literature on gardening with woodland herbs, on silvicultural practices, on the reforestation of mined lands and on the use of woody materials in landscape design or for the creation of wildlife habitat; but could find very few discussions of the restoration of entire woodland communities. As a consequence, we decided to spend the semester establishing an overview of the subject. We approached the topic by locating as much information as we could (given our resources and time-constraints) about existing restoration projects, reviewing portions of the forest-related literature mentioned above for information that might be relevant, and interviewing woodland restorationists in the Madison area. Some of our contacts included Dr. Virginia Kline, Lecturer and Ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Botany and Arboretum; Simon Widstrand, Conservation Specialist for the Madison Parks Division; Wayne Pauly, Dane County Parks and Highway Department; and Konrad Liegel, who was at the time site manager for the International Crane Foundation near Baraboo, WI. We also visited several woodland restorations in the Madison area, notably at the UW Arboretum and Owen Conservation Park. We wanted to learn who was doing woodland restorations and for what purposes. We wanted to find out the methods restorationists are using for forest restoration work and to get an idea what factors are most important to the success of their efforts. By the end of the semester we had managed to come up with at least preliminary answers to all of these questions