News

Project Quercus Focuses on Oak Survival

McHenry County residents have embarked on an ambitious project to ensure that oaks will have a future on their lands. One aspect of this work has grabbed recent headlines: children are planting and caring for nursery-raised saplings.

Project Quercus (Latin for “oak”) is a collaboration among the Land Conservancy of McHenry County, the McHenry County Conservation District (MCCD), and others. It aims to preserve and restore the oak woods of the county. The impetus came from Joe Beeson of Glacier Oaks Nursery, who expressed concern about the absence of young oaks in the woodlands.

MCCD studied the county’s historic distribution of timbered lands (predominantly bur and white oaks), using the surveyors’ notes from the 1832 public land survey, an 1872 “plat map,” and aerial photos from 1939 and 2005. The findings, reported in late 2007, were alarming: the oak coverage had declined dramatically during each period, from 143,000 acres (33 percent of the county) in 1832 to 18,000 acres in 2005. Just 13 percent of the presettlement woods remained. According to Lisa Haderlein, executive director of the Land Conservancy, little or no oak regeneration is occurring, and the existing trees are nearing the ends of their lives. Ed Collins, natural resource manager for MCCD, told the Chicago Tribune, “The oak in McHenry County could disappear as a self-sustaining ecosystem during the next 20 years.”

Project Quercus began with awards to landowners who demonstrate best practices in managing their woods. The planting of two-year-old oaks began last year, and four plantings will occur this year. The plantings take place on both public and private lands, if private landowners have agreed to conservation easements. Project Quercus matches youth groups with landowners, and the children take responsibility both for the planting and for the ongoing care of the trees. According to Haderlein, this approach gives the oaks a head start on life and also provides an opportunity to the community for hands-on participation and learning.

This year volunteers will conduct a basic inventory of target plots to record the character of the woods, recording tree species and size, and shrub composition. Haderlein says, “We are teaching our volunteers to recognize just three invasive shrubs: buckthorn, honeysuckle, and multiflora rose. All of these are pretty bad, but we find that these are what the monitors are most likely to encounter.” Controlling these invasive species is a future step in the project.

Haderlein sees the work on private land as crucial to the future of the oak ecosystems. “The vast majority of the oak woods are on private lands, and that will always be true. If the conservation district owns 10 percent of the county, that leaves 90 percent of land owned by others whom we need to engage in this work.”

— Barbara Hill