Island Press Field Notes

Congratulations Teresa Pereira and Taylor Keegan on winning the Island Press and Society for Ecological Restoration Why Restore? video contest! Thank you for taking part in our contest and for your contributions to ecological restoration. Keep up the good work! Check out the winning video below and read on to learn more about the winning duo and their project. Teresa Pereira and Taylor Keegan Teresa Pereira, Master's candidate Temple University, Landscape Architecture and Ecological Restoration Taylor Keegan, Master's candidate

In a 2006 article [PDF] in The American Naturalist, a small herd of perfectly respectable conservation biologists advocates a bold ecological restoration project they call “Pleistocene Rewilding.” The concept itself is outrageously wild. First of all, “rewilding” is the process of reintroducing species to ecosystems from which they have been extirpated—usually by that big bully, Homo Notsosapiens.

Stone Prairie Farm, the eighty acres of prairie, wetland, savanna and headwaters stream that we have restored serves as a snow fence. It captures snow and prevents drifting across neighboring county roads. The accumulating snow remains within the dense vegetation cover now growing on the restored undulating landscapes, including the high ridge tops and sloping expanses.

The dustings from most previous storms, and atypical warm conditions, and storm paths that have gone around our southern Wisconsin farm, have left us in an extended “fall or spring-season-like trance”.  Fields of standing upright plant stalks blow and shake in the wind, brown, gray and straw colored. Finally, after much of the winter without winter-like conditions, Stone Prairie Farm is under a blanket of deep snow. Usually, the first heavy snows arch these stems to the ground.