Climate Change | Impacts
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OUTDOOR ILLINOIS JOURNAL – Emerging Invasive Plants in Illinois
Kevin Rohling shares what plants are starting to become more of a problem in forested areas and how Early Detection, Rapid Response or EDRR is the best medicine.
“Invasive species are often hugely problematic in forestry and natural resource management. Problems range from tree seedling suppression and overall exclusion of native species seen in areas severely invaded with species, such as stiltgrass, or even the near annihilation of entire genera, as is occurring with our ash tree species confronted by the emerald ash borer invasion. When invasive species become ubiquitous on the landscape, control efforts shift goals from total eradication to containment or sometimes localized control in certain areas. We want to avoid that situation, so early detection of potentially invasive species offers us the best chance of eradication or suppression requiring fewer resources over time.
One of the most effective actions people can take in combating invasive species is called Early Detection, Rapid Response, or EDRR. EDRR is most effective when a new invader is recognized early in the invasion. It is quickly dealt with to eradicate the population before it becomes so widespread that eradication is extremely difficult or impossible. One way to improve our early detection capabilities is to review new invaders that may be coming to our area from elsewhere. While the species I’m about to introduce are already problematic on the landscape more broadly, early detection and rapid response in places where they are not yet widespread can reduce the overall negative effects and costs of these invaders in regions where they have yet to gain a foothold…”
Read the full story here about “Emerging Invasive Plants in Illinois” by Kevin Rohling, Extension Specialist in Forest Management and Ecology with the University of Illinois Extension Forestry.
Read below about the latest climate research where scientists say “global warming and its impacts are unfolding faster than expected.”
Climate Change and Assisted Migration of Plants
By Alan Branhagen, Executive Director, Natural Land Institute
Kentucky Coffeetree
I was asked by a local conservation consultant employee if the Natural Land Institute has practiced any assisted migration plantings. Assisted migration is where humans have moved plants by planting them beyond their pre-settlement range. It has become a topic with concerns over climate change’s impact on many plants’ habitat and that our roads, fields, and developed landscapes are barriers for plants to disperse their seeds/fruit into new locations more suitable to their adaptations.
First of all, humans have assisted the migration of plants since they entered the Americas many millennia ago. Some Midwestern examples include the Kentucky Coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus) whose seeds were used in games by Native Americans. Pecans (Carya illinoinensis) were also planted by Native Americans as food forests well into the Midwest up the Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera) was a valued commodity for bows because of its wood’s strength and flexibility and cultivated well beyond its range — first discovered by colonists in a native Osage village in what is now Missouri by Louis & Clark’s famous expedition. Then there are the food crops from sunflowers to corn that were cultivated by our first peoples. Peaches and Apples have amazing stories starting with the Silk Road though they came to North America with colonial settlers. Now we move plants around globally mainly for food and ornamental purposes every day.
The aforementioned coffeetree and osage orange were trees that were in trouble as the last Ice Age (probably in combination with humans), wiped out the large animals “megafauna” that evolved to disperse their seeds. Things like mastadons for osage orange and giant ground sloths for coffeetrees ate the fruits and dispersed the seeds in their droppings. Humans may have unintentionally saved these trees! The wildly popular avocado is another American tree humans saved from extinction for its use as food.
I never thought about tree migration until I was a grad student at LSU. In our Flora of Louisiana class, we visited the amazing Tunica Hills on the Louisiana-Mississippi border on the east edge of the great Mississippi River floodplain. The plant diversity is mind boggling there and I was in heaven. We hiked down to where the creeks flowing through the loess hills met the flat floodplain and there were SPRUCE cones emerging from the creek bank! A tree of the northland not even fossilized and surrounded by Southern magnolias, baldcypress, American beech.
I’ve since read about the aforementioned spruces in the book I recommend if this interest you: Forests in Peril: Tracking Deciduous Trees from Ice-Age Refuges into the Greenhouse World by Hazel Delacourt. Somewhere I’ve recently read that questioned if these spruce trees are in fact extinct. Maybe they are in some remote valley in Wisconsin, overlooked by botanists – this was stated because of the 1994 discovery of live Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis — formerly known only from fossils) in a remote valley just 90 miles from Sydney, Australia! An even better read on this subject is The Journeys of Trees: A Story about Forests, People, and the Future by Zach St. George.
Fellow Land Trusts in Michigan and Massachusetts are practicing assisted migration.
Michigan link: https://swmlc.org/what-were-doing/
Massachusetts link: https://www.smith.edu/news-events/news/saving-mountain-magnolia
In western Massachusetts they are planting Mountain or Fraser Magnolias (Magnolia fraseri) as this tree is tied to high elevations in the lower Appalachians and as conditions warm, these low mountains will soon run out of habitat for the species. Assisting their migration to the northern Appalachians is probably a good plan to ensure the long-term survival of the species.
Climate Change Pages
WHAT TO EXPECT WITH INVASIVES AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Read this blog (click on the headline above) by University of Illinois Extension’s Chris Evans to learn about impacts of invasvise species to climate change. You will also find other resources in this link.
Find the link to listen to a companion podcast on this topic here.
Flora Changes Observed in the Wake of Climate Change
By Alan Branhagen, Executive Director, Natural Land Institute, September 6, 2024
As our area is experiencing overall milder winters and an increased average temperature, we are observing some changes in the flora that can be attributed to this.
Two trees in particular have increasingly naturalized or self-sown whereas they rarely did in the past even though they have been widely cultivated since settlement of the area. The first is a canopy tree native just to our east: Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) and the second an understory tree native just to our south: Eastern Redbud (Cercis canadensis).
Tulip trees are in the Magnolia Family and are the tallest non-conifer tree native to Eastern North America (Eastern White Pines grew taller). Trees readily top 100-feet and were known to grow to heights approaching 175 feet. They are found from southern New England to northern Florida and west to easternmost Texas, southeast Missouri, and Lower Michigan. That makes their presettlement native as close as the southern tip of Lake Michigan where the massive lake moderates the climate. They are the state tree of Indiana but originally didn’t cross into Illinois anywhere but the southern fourth of our state.
Tulip Trees are planted as large shade trees but recently their seedling and sapling trees are starting to show up in regional parks like Rock Cut, Kishwaukee Gorge North Forest Preserve and NLI’s Foss Farm northeast of Roscoe. Now, I often see seedlings in my neighborhood but never when I lived there 27-years ago – back then, only Klehm Arboretum had naturalizing Tulip Trees.
Eastern Redbud is a legume and a small, usually multi-trunked tree native to the Lower Midwest and American South. It’s presettlement range did go up to southwestern Michigan and northern Indiana, and up the Illinois River and the Mississippi to around where our Rock River joins it.
Redbuds flourish along the edges of woodlands or in open woods growing 15-30 feet tall, occasionally taller. It’s not the longest-lived tree and often older tree’s trunks splay out and hug the ground, forming a spectacular living sculpture. New sprouts emerge from the base to rejuvenate the tree. It blooms before it leaves out in spring, the only such tree whose flowers aren’t white but a vivid, hard to describe raspberry sherbet!
Redbuds have begun, relatively recently in our area, to self-sow near where they are planted. I see trees that look native along the Rock River in Ogle County and in places like Rock Cut State Park and Fuller Forest Preserve. Indian Hill Manor and Anderson Gardens report abundant self-sowing and I can also see that change in my neighborhood, my new yard had over a dozen seedlings I’ve flagged to let grow. NLI’s Nygren Wetland Preserve, Keefer & Burr Oak Valley Preserves have naturalized redbud – in habitat just like it would be found wild.
So now the question is do we call these plants native? They were certainly regionally or Midwestern natives that were expanding their range northward after the last round of glaciation. We forget that trees migrate, it just takes time for their offspring to move unlike a bird that can fly or a mammal that can walk. Since the naturalizing trees are from trees people have planted the term “assisted migration” is used. Tulip trees produce abundant nectar and pollen rich flowers utilized by many local pollinators and birds like our Baltimore and Orchard Orioles. Squirrels love the seeds. There are several native moths whose caterpillars eat the leaves, but it’s distinctive specialist, the tulip tree silk moth has not expanded with the tree to this area. Redbuds also have nectar and pollen rich flowers utilized by many of our native bees, butterflies and moths and the foliage is also utilized by quite a few native moths. Redbud is often under valued as a caterpillar host because most of the research is done on the East Coast and this is more of a Heartland species.
I would call both species “functionally native” which means they support local wildlife just like other presettlement native trees. The term “neonative” has also been proposed as they expand back into ranges held in pre-glacial times. Both plants are good choices for climate resilient landscapes and would have eventually gotten here on their own, with a moderating climate.