Resistance, resilience, and transition

By Mary Hammes, Environmental Stewardship and Volunteer Manager Mississippi Park Connection

This year, Mississippi Park Connection and the National Park Service are creating a teaching forest at Crosby Farm Regional Park for researchers, land managers and the public to learn best practices for climate change adaptation. This is part of a 20-year study of forest-management techniques to increase the park’s ability to adapt to climate change. The work is a partnership with more than 30 land-managing agencies as well as a network of academic researchers from across the country.

We know all kinds of wildlife count on the river as a migratory flyway, nesting place and home for raising their young. That’s why building resiliency into the floodplain forests is so important. Several factors make habitat along the river highly susceptible to the impacts of climate change. Emerald ash borer, an invasive beetle, will wipe out hundreds of thousands of ash trees. Loss of these trees coupled with increased precipitation due to climate change will cause erosion of the floodplain and soft sandstone bluffland along the river corridor.

At the same time, gaps left in the tree canopy by the loss of ash at Crosby Farm Regional Park are an opportunity to study and plant new species of trees that will flourish in changing climate conditions. For example, oak trees that are currently more common to southern Minnesota will extend their habitat northward as climate conditions change. Other, new-to-us species like American sycamore might present our forests with pathways to surviving a future of uncertainty.

This year, Mississippi Park Connection will plant tree plots at Crosby Farm with one of three methods: resistance, resilience or transition. The project will demonstrate that adaptive future-thinking forestry is important to a healthy river and is a necessary addition to traditional restoration.

Resistance: maintain relatively unchanged conditions over time. Remove non-native invasive plants to make room for native plants. Plant species that currently grow on site such as silver maple, hackberry, cottonwood and Dutch-elm resistant American elm.

Resilience: allow some change in current conditions, but encourage return to original conditions. Remove non-native invasive plants and shelterwood. Plant diverse native flood and drought-tolerant trees sourced from local growers, like swamp white oak and river birch.

Transition: implement changes to encourage ecosystems to adapt to new conditions. Plant tree species that are native to floodplains south of the park, like Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. Examples include sycamore, honey locust, sweet gum and northern catalpa.

This work was made possible by the Wildlife Conservation Society through its Climate Adaptation Fund through a grant by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.