OES Ecological Restoration Update January 2014               

Hi all!

I have had a lot of questions from teachers and students at OES about the work that Clean Water Services is doing in the marsh and forest on school property.  I am going to try using this online forum to provide the update information to everyone.  Let me know what you think.

CWS Background:

Clean Water Services is the wastewater and stormwater management utility in the Tualatin River Watershed.  Clean Water Services operates four wastewater treatment plants and 40 pump stations. We also work with our 12 member cities to build and maintain the public sanitary sewer and surface water management system.  The Watershed Management Department (where I work) does ecological restoration projects throughout the basin.  Often working with city, nonprofit and school partners, we improve water quality by building and improving plant communities along waterways.  We tend to focus our projects on establishing plants along streams to shade the water (which prevents the water from becoming too warm to support our fish populations) and creating wetland complexes that retain stormwater and provide wildlife habitat.

Vegetation Restoration Projects in General:

These projects involve weed removal, replanting, monitoring and maintenance.  The trees and vegetation being removed are nonnative invasive species.  That means they are both species that were introduced to the local ecosystem and also that they tend to grow aggressively and outcompete native species.  That is ecologically harmful because you wind up with monocultures (dense stands of a single species) rather than a mix of native trees and shrubs with room for younger age classes of trees to root and grow.  It is harmful from a stormwater management perspective as well since many of the invasive species (especially the ones that grow as groundcover) out-compete shrubs with deeper root systems that prevent erosion.  Invasive grasses form dense monocultures that lack the habitat value of diverse wetland grass assemblages but still don’t provide the shade that shrubs would.

The species we are removing are English ivy, English hawthorn, Himalayan blackberry, pie cherry, English holly, reed canary grass, Portuguese laurel and others.  When this involves spraying herbicide we only work while students are not on campus and our contractors post signs with the name of the chemicals being used.  The spray itself is mixed with blue dye to make it clear where work is happening.  Once the spray is dry it is safe to walk through the area but the blue dye will be visible for a while afterwards. 

We will also be doing cut work that involves chain saws or brush cutters.  When our crews are sawing they will either be dropping invasive trees and shrubs, girdling invasive trees (which kills them but leaves them standing) or cutting around plantings to decrease competition. Stumps with blue dye are from weed trees like hawthorn that were cut and sprayed to prevent them from resprouting.

We will be replanting with native trees like oak, ash, maple, western redcedar, and cascara; shrubs like willow, spirea, dogwood, twinberry, snowberry, red-flowering currant and ninebark; and wetland sedges and rushes. 

Schedule:

Fall 2013- Himalayan blackberry, teasel, yellow flag iris removal

December 2013- English hawthorn,  invasive cherry and holly removal and chipping (the pile of chipped material is fair game if anyone wants to spread it on trails or around the planting down by SPARC).

January 2014- Ground ivy spray and cutting climbing ivy at the base of trees

February 2014- Planting around the edges of the ponds in the middle of the site. We will focus on the areas where there are fewer remaining invasive plant species.

Spring and Summer 2014 – Continued invasive species removal (teasel, blackberry, ivy and hawthorn especially)

Winter 2014-15- larger scale planting throughout the site as part of our 1 Million, 1 Year, 1 Water campaign. 

**And ongoing after that, we are required to maintain this site for at least the next 10 years. 

Map:

 

How students can be involved:

The triangular area south of Vermont and east of Nicol will be available for planting by classes that would like to help out next fall or during the spring of 2015.

Teachers who would be interested in attending a turtle monitoring training and doing surveys on the ponds should let me know.

Any class or student can walk around, make observations on plants and animals, take pictures, sample water quality or map invasive species populations over time. 

I hope you all appreciate how special it is to have a backyard like the one OES has!

Thanks!

Margaret Wagner

Clean Water Services