The Restoring Ecological Health to Your Land Workbook

Steven I. Apfelbaum, Alan W. Haney

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781597268042
• eBook ISBN: 9781610910491
• Subtopic: Ecology

Turning ecological restoration from idea to action takes more than inspiration—it requires clear planning, organized tools, and confident decision-making. The Restoring Ecological Health to Your Land Workbook is designed to guide landowners, volunteers, and restoration practitioners through the often-complex process of restoring natural systems, even without a background in science.

Built as a hands-on companion to the widely used guidebook, Restoring Ecological Health to Your Land, this workbook translates core concepts into actionable steps. Inside are customizable worksheets and templates that help users map out restoration goals, select plant materials and equipment, build project timelines, monitor progress, and estimate costs. The included spreadsheets and planning tools—also available online—allow you to tailor every phase of a project to your landscape, budget, and timeline.

What sets this resource apart is how it bridges planning and practice. Readers move from broad ecological principles to the practical tasks of organizing work crews, tracking site changes, and refining techniques based on real results. Each form and checklist has been shaped by years of field use and teaching experience, giving users the clarity and structure needed to keep a project moving forward.

With this workbook, restoration becomes less daunting—and more doable. Whether you're stewarding a prairie, forest, or wetland, it puts the framework in your hands to take the next step with confidence and purpose.

Step 1.

Inventory and Map Your Land

If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.

Aldo Leopold

Ecological restoration must begin with understanding the land with an emphasis on determining its ecological health. Rarely will a tract of land have been sufficiently studied at the outset of restoration planning to provide a sufficient assessment to complete the restoration and management planning data form (see appendix 1). More typically, you will start from scratch. This step begins with an overview of how to assess the land then covers the details for evaluating the ecosystems.

Land evaluation involves three processes that can be done sequentially, or more or less simultaneously, depending on the size and complexity of the landscape:

1. Identify and map the ecological units (plant communities or cover types if the land is not too disturbed or in agricultural crops).
2. Characterize the communities as to dominant species and location in the landscape with special attention to ecotones and succession.
3. Determine the ecological health of each community or ecosystem. Note: we will refer to either “community” or “ecosystem,” depending on whether the emphasis is on the species present (community), or the ecological processes (ecosystem).

Each process demands more knowledge and interpretative skill than the previous. Some steps may exceed your knowledge or experience. If so, we offer alternatives but encourage you to keep learning and seek assistance when needed.

The first process requires only good observation to delineate the different ecological units present. We use “unit” here because disturbance often disguises the variation in edaphic conditions such as soil, hydrology, and topography that would have led to variation in vegetation patterns. Where vegetation patterns are present, they reveal ecological units. For example, you may see a weedy hillside grading into a wetland at the bottom of the slope. These are different ecological units that you would map. You need not worry about the details of species and variation in soils at this point, but simply look for differences in vegetation, topography, or hydrology that are apparent. Smaller fields, lawns, or vacant lots will generally be mapped as a unit at this stage, especially if you see no natural breaks in topography or hydrology.

FIGURE 1.1. Ecological units on a simple Wisconsin landscape, Stone Prairie Farm, WI

The aim of the second process is to define and characterize the ecosystems that occupy each unit you have identified. The dominant plants are most often used, but variation in soil and hydrology may also become essential clues, especially if the vegetation has been largely altered by agriculture or development (fig. 1.1). This will require that you investigate deeper, perhaps examining soil characteristics, although superficially at this stage. During this process you refine your initial interpretation of the landscape.

The third process is the most demanding. It involves “detective work.” In this process, the aim is to understand the reasons for the patterns you have mapped. What are the differences between the units? Are the differences a result of variation in soil, hydrology, or human disturbances? Perhaps they represent different successional stages following some prior disturbance. How was the site disturbed? How do units grade one into the other along slopes, shifts in soil characteristics, or hydrology and drainage patterns (fig. 1.2). Answers likely will involve variation in edaphic conditions, but also past and ongoing disturbances, what are called stressors (fig. 1.3). Understanding how past and present stressors shape ecosystems is fundamental to the development of a good restoration plan.

On a very simple piece of property, you may be able to conduct all three processes at one time. However, this is not possible on complex properties. A simple landscape may have only one edaphic setting that now is cultivated, perhaps a corn or wheat field, or a vacant lot. In most cases, however, even a forty-acre, nearly flat field will have variation in soils and hydrology worth noting. A complex landscape will contain many ecological units, perhaps with remnants of historic vegetation in various conditions of ecological health comingled with cultivated land, and often other units that have been altered in various ways. Commonly, hydrology also will have been altered by channelization or with agricultural tiles.

FIGURE 1.2. Elaboration of drainage patterns

Regardless of whether simple or complex, the three processes are equally important. The easiest way to capture the information is by mapping what you see on the landscape at the appropriate scale over a topographic map or aerial photograph, a process we explain next. The maps become the basis for subsequent restoration planning, so care in developing them is important.

Mapping

The information required to develop good restoration plans must be georeferenced, that is, the information is site specific. Each item of information relates to one or more specific locations on the land. Maps are used to georeference the information and facilitate collection and compilation of information, as well as guide restoration treatments and monitoring to be described later. All tasks associated with land evaluation involve mapping what you find in the field. Mapping will require that you have some basic tools and equipment, such as clipboards, compass, notebook. (See appendix 2 for information on equipment).

FIGURE 1.3. Stressors on the landscape, Stone Prairie Farm, WI

It is possible to create a map of ecological units, also called an “existing condition” map, from good aerial photographs and other public domain information such as topographic and soil maps. However, we emphasize that there are several reasons why evaluations done remotely should be considered only preliminary. Aerial photographs are often several years old and may no longer be accurate or applicable. Even with a current photograph, unless you have considerable experience in evaluating and interpreting this kind of data, it is unlikely that you can create maps remotely that will be accurate enough for the next steps in the process. Even more important, the most successful restoration efforts result from an intimate familiarity with the landscape, where you begin to understand the nuances of the land. We use the term land here and elsewhere in the same sense that Leopold did—the soil, water, flora, and fauna that inhabit it. This level of intimacy occurs only by being on the land. You cannot gain it from photographs or through the windows of your pickup. Required insight will come only from close observation, feeling the soils, taking measurements, learning the plants and animals, and awareness of how the ecosystems change season to season and year to year.

It is important to systematically record what you see and learn about the land. We urge that you get in the habit of carrying a field notebook supplemented with the standard field notes data form (data form 1.2, appendix 1). This form provides a catalog of features (data form 1.3, appendix 1) you should consider coding and mapping as you progress through the field assessment.

The field notes data form also leads you through a sequence of questions (box 1.1) that you should apply to each ecological unit you identify and map during the field inventory. As you map an ecological unit, either go through the field notes data form at that time, or return later to do so. When you are finished with this initial evaluation, you should have a field notes data form page completed for each ecosystem or land unit defined in the hand sketch.

The balance of this step leads you through these processes task by task. The more carefully you complete these tasks, the more likely you are to develop a successful restoration plan.

Field Assessment

If you are not well acquainted with the land to be restored, we suggest you begin by reviewing a plat map of the property usually obtainable from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) office or from the county clerk of deeds. Familiarize yourself with property boundaries and walk the land to get a feel for topography, streams and wetlands, disturbances, and general vegetation distribution. This is facilitated by comparing what you see in the field with a soils map, topographic map, or aerial photograph, preferably all three. You will need these layers of information for your basemap anyway, so better to have them from the outset. Topographic maps are readily available from the internet through TerraServer.com or topomaps.usgs.gov/. At Terra-Server you can download either aerial photographs or topographic maps covering any property in United States. You need to reconcile property boundaries with the aerial photograph or topographic map, however. Your NRCS office probably can provide a soils map showing property boundaries. Alternatively, for many locations in the United States, soil maps have been digitized; go online and enter “soil map” and your county and state to download a soil map covering your property, but you will then need to overlay property boundaries. Many counties also have digitized plat maps that can be downloaded.

High quality aerial photographs usually can be obtained from the NRCS office. Get the most recent flight, often no more than a few years old. Some offices may have photographs dating as far back as the 1930s, when aerial photography was just being started and these older maps will also be useful when you investigate the history of the property (step 2). Ideally, it would be good to have a historic photograph from each decade. Either have the photographs scanned at very high resolution, or reproduced using a photographic service. If you cannot find the photographs locally, they can be ordered online for most areas in the United States. Check National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov), TerraServer.com, or GoogleEarth (http://earth.google.com/).

BOX 1.1. QUESTIONS TO HELP BECOME FAMILIAR WITH LAND ASSESSMENT

Vegetation and Plant Communities

1. Are the different types of plant communities easily definable, and can you map them clearly and distinctly?
2. Where are there difficulties in defining plant communities, what and where are the confusing features?
3. Is the confusion resulting in a location where one type of plant community may be invading another or where a recent disturbance obscures site condition?
4. What would happen if growth of the plant community and disturbances continued unbothered in, say, ten to twenty-five years? Would your mapping of the types and boundaries of each plant community type change?

Physical and Chemical Features: Bedrock, Soils, Hydrology, Nutrient Enrichment

1. Are there distinct transitions in any underlying physical setting that are reflected by the plant communities, including crop growth and success?
2. What changes in the site’s physical or chemical factors are believed to have occurred or continue to operate on the land?
3. Are there locations on the land where a reduced availability of light by dense invasive vegetation growth is contributing to the decline of soil-stabilizing vegetation, and soil erosion is occurring or possible?
4. Are there locations where groundwater emerges to the surface as springs, seeps, marsh, or wet ground? Based on land forms are there areas where the surface infiltration is likely to be occurring to support the springs or seeps?
5. Are there locations where soils move, slump, erode, or are unstable because of frost heaving, shrink-swell?
6. Are there locations where runoff from neighboring lands enters your land, or is your land receiving soil eroded from a neighbor’s land? Farm or ranch land, or urban or industrial setting?
7. Have drainage features been modified by straightening, deepening, damaging, draining, drawing, or diversifying?

Emotional, Spiritual, Inspirational, Experiential

1. Are there l...

Table of contents

• About Island Press
• SOCIETY FOR ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• Step 1. - Inventory and Map Your Land
• Step 2. - Investigate Historic Conditions
• Step 3. - Interpret Landscape Changes
• Step 4. - Develop Goals and Objectives
• Step 5. - Develop Your Restoration Plan
• Step 6. - Develop a Good Monitoring Program
• Step 7. - Implement the Plan
• Step 8. - Maintain Good Records
• Step 9. - Review the Project
• Step 10. - Share the Restoration Process
• Appendix 1. - Data Forms
• Appendix 2. - Equipment, Safety, and Protection for Restoration Planning
• Appendix 3. - Restoration Contracts
• Appendix 4. - Additional Resources for Readers
• THE SCIENCE AND PRACTICE OF ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION
• Island Press | Board of Directors