Restoring our Native Wildflowers

The first time I strolled through Baltimore Woods in early May, I was astounded by the number of beautiful wildflowers bursting with color. Many of you probably saw the patches of red and white trillium lining the trails, interspersed with delicate yellow trout lily. The wildflower density and diversity at Baltimore Woods is surely leaps and bounds ahead of most New York forests, but are they as dense and diverse as they have been in the past?

White Trillium

New York State’s extensive farming history has left us with vast expanses of abandoned farmland covering over 50 percent of the state. If you discount the Adirondacks and the Catskills, this figure jumps to approximately 90 percent! As decades passed, trees, shrubs, and herbs regained their long lost territory, but these lands still lack an important ecological and aesthetic feature: their native wildflowers. SUNY-ESF professor GregoryMcGee has studied this phenomenon for the past decade and believes that there is nothing inherently wrong with these post-agricultural forests. Rather, the presence of these species appears to be limited by their sluggish dispersal rates. For instance, many of these species have migrated only 5 to 10 meters into post-agricultural woodlands from adjoining forests during the past 70 to 100 years!

Trout Lily

In the face of global climate change, these small and sparse populations of native wildflowers have a poor chance of surviving. Given the important ecological roles of these understory plants, we cannot wait for them to reestablish naturally, but planting and monitoring efforts will either require a lot of hands or a lot of time. Dr. McGee and I have created a solution by launching a citizen science wildflower restoration project. By involving volunteers and school groups we turn a need for many data-collecting hands into a valuable educational opportunity. Participants can learn about identifying native wildflowers, plant life cycles, creating experiments, and drawing conclusions from scientific data. In addition to gaining a hands-on, outdoor education, participants will gain a sense of accomplishment for contributing to a professional study that impacts their own forests. These so-called “citizen scientists” will also be given the opportunity to return to the project year after year to see how their efforts have impacted the forest.

Surely it would be easier to simply organize volunteer planting events and stop there. Why have we decided to set up study sites, gather data, and monitor these plots? In order to restore our wildflowers efficiently, we need to know which methods work for each species. 

We will answer questions like: 

• Is it worth relocating plants using root material or can we simply gather seeds?
• How many seeds do we need to sow to establish a reproducing plant? 
• Can we break root material apart and grow multiple plants, or does the root need to remain intact? 

Once this information is known, we can launch a large-scale restoration effort.

Foamflower

We couldn’t have launched this project without help from the community. We have set up plots at the Camillus Unique Area with Solvay high school students, at the Skaneateles Conservation Area with the local garden club, and with our dedicated Baltimore Woods volunteers here at the woods. So if you see the little colored flags in the woods near Phillips Pond, you have found our wildflower restoration study site. Please be sure to stay on the trail in this area, and keep an eye out for some beautiful new growth here in the years to come.

Blog post by Emily Van Ness