Campus News - Classroom

Ecology classes hope to weed out a predator at the UW Arboretum.

Greene Prairie at the UW Arboretum is one of the finest restored landscapes in the world, a grassland so meticulously crafted that even experts mistake it for pristine nature. Sadly, though, it’s hardly the jewel of ecological restoration it once was — a fact that became all too clear to students in last fall’s General Ecology 460 course.

“It’s so thick,” said Amy Hong ’10 about the choking expanse of reed canary grass that blankets the prairie’s southern end. “When you look at it, you can just tell — it’s the only thing out there.”

“It’s startling [to see] how much it has changed the appearance,” added her classmate Daniel Underbakke ’10. “You walk out on that prairie and think, ‘Wow, something’s not right here.’ ”

Reed canary grass was indeed never in the plans when botanist Henry Greene first created this prairie out of abandoned farmland in the 1940s. Nevertheless, in recent years the plant has muscled in and spread, thanks mostly to urban stormwater runoff that courses across the site with every rain. Today, nearly ten acres of big bluestem, compass plant, and other prairie species have been replaced by the shoulder-high, invasive grass. And though its march has slowed of late, scientists don’t know how much more land reed canary grass might consume — or exactly how to stop it.

Still, there is hope, and some of it rests with these students. A couple of years ago, an Arboretum restoration planning committee began devising a large-scale experiment in which a mix of burning, applying herbicide treatments, and seeding of native plants would be tested for its ability to subdue the weed. Based on a decade’s worth of scientific studies by Arboretum research director Joy Zedler MS’66, PhD’68 and her graduate students, the plan was backed by plenty of brainpower.

But the committee also needed manpower, and that’s where the students came in. Last September, some sixty General Ecology class members surveyed plant diversity and abundance in experimental and control plots, sowed native seeds, and then later crunched the data they’d collected. The work continues this fall with a new cohort of students, and the plan is to enlist classes to help for three more years to come.

“At a time when resources are stretched, we could never, as Arboretum staff, have pulled this experiment off on our own,” says Arboretum ecologist Brad Herrick, who is helping oversee the work. “So incorporating the students is a perfect way to do this. It’s an education for them, first and foremost. But at the same time, we’re advancing restoration ecology research and addressing land-management questions.”

Finding ways to restore lands overrun by reed canary grass couldn’t be more urgent. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources estimates that the plant now dominates more than half a million acres — or almost 10 percent — of Wisconsin’s wetlands, and has invaded many, many more. Once established, it spreads quickly via seeds and underground stems, snuffing out native plants at an alarming rate and eliminating habitat for wildlife.

By showing students an example of the problem in the university’s own backyard, Susan Will-Wolf, the course’s laboratory instructor, hopes they’ll recognize that nature doesn’t necessarily reside away from people. Instead, humans are an integral part of the landscape and shape it every day — whether they intend to or not.

“I want the students to realize that the natural world spans a continuum from urban natural areas to wilderness, and that we need to care for all of it,” she says.

Caring for the land isn’t necessarily easy, though, as the students quickly learned last September. The sun was hot, the air was muggy, and the experimental plots were unexpectedly tough to find. Then came the plant identification. Reed canary grass was easy to spot, of course, once students knew what to look for. But they also had to learn four dozen or so native species and then carefully estimate the amount of ground they covered — all while swatting at a cloud of voracious mosquitoes.

Meanwhile, Arboretum staff and course instructors scurried about, answering questions, showing students the tricks to sampling, and reviewing the data they’d collected. The amount of effort and coordination made a strong impression on Carrie Kretsch ’07.

“I remember my mom always griping about the dandelions in our backyard,” she says. “But I’d never really thought about how difficult [a plant] might actually be to get rid of, or why someone would spend so much effort and money in trying to do so.”

Because last fall’s students were working during the experiment’s first year, they didn’t record much change in the prairie as a result of the herbicide treatments and burning. Nonetheless, Underbakke appreciated the chance to collect some real data and analyze them back in the lab.

“We saw while being out in the prairie that, yes, there’s a heck of a lot of reed canary grass out there, but then [the analysis] showed the same thing statistically,” he says. “It’s very powerful to see how what you perceived visually is reflected in the statistics.”

The data collected last fall also provide a critical baseline against which subsequent classes can compare their findings and, they hope, begin to document a recovery in the prairie. But even if the experiment falls short of controlling the weed, it’s sure to offer scientific insights that Arboretum staff and researchers can incorporate into future restoration attempts, says Herrick.

In the meantime, a small payoff came at the end of each afternoon’s toil last September: getting to sow the seeds of native plants with such charming names as Joe-Pye weed, porcupine sedge, and yellow avens. The hypothesis is that suppressing reed canary grass with burning and spraying will allow these species to gain a roothold, and then grow up and shade out the sun-loving invader.

For Kretsch, the day’s final activity came as a delightful
surprise.

“What am I doing with this?” she recalls asking when someone suddenly handed her a bucket of seeds. “And they said, ‘Oh, we’re restoring the prairie.’ And I said, ‘I’m restoring the prairie?’ It was cool.”

— Madeline Fisher PhD’98

History 319: The Vietnam Wars

At first glance, there seems to be a glaring misprint on the syllabus for this course. America had one conflict in Vietnam, hence one war. Right? Not so fast.

“We’re not just doing one war,” says professor Alfred McCoy, “which I think is a fundamental mistake many courses make — to see this as an exercise unique to the United States. There was in fact a multiplicity of Vietnam wars.”

History 319 focuses on the American war in Vietnam as one of six interrelated regional conflicts spanning more than a century, beginning in 1850 with the French colonial conquest and ending in 1979 with Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia. Offered every fall to 150 undergraduates, the class has become one of the most popular at the UW since McCoy arrived on campus in 1989.

The course material focuses less on memorization and more on forcing students into critical engagement, with McCoy stressing the importance of multiple interpretations in studying history. Veterans are invited into the course’s discussion sections to talk about the war, creating an important cross-generational dialogue, which is best exemplified by Danielle Trussoni ’96’s national award-winning book, Falling through the Earth, which began as her term paper for the course.

History 319 culminates with a twelve-page research paper that draws from more than a dozen primary and secondary sources. Crafting a well researched, educated argument, McCoy notes, is one of the most important abilities for a historian. “I often tell my students that after all the details, names, dates, and places have long been forgotten,” he says, “what I really want [them] to take away from the class is how to make an argument.”

— Ben Wischnewski ’05