The Front Lines for Habitat

Isaac Ogle uses yellow flagging to mark an invasive bush honeysuckle on Markham Hill for removal.

When these invasive plants get into wild spaces, “there’s nothing to check them – no fire, no mowing,” says Isaac Ogle, founder of Comprehensive Botanical Services. “They completely displace your forest.  No regeneration of the forest happens when you get a complete understory of Amur honeysuckle.”

Isaac is on the front lines for native habitat in Northwest Arkansas. His company works to remove invasive species and maintain forests so that native species can survive and thrive.

Invasive plants aren’t the only challenge facing the woodlands of NWA. Historical photos of Fayetteville, including downtown and the university, show a city that was virtually cleared of trees. According to Isaac, the second-growth forests that followed grew in absence of thinning or fire, resulting in an unnaturally crowded woodland.

“If nobody does anything, this landscape will become unrecognizable to the nature that knows it.”

“They are forests, but they are really a thicket – there are way too many trees per acre,” he says. “In order to have a healthy, sustainable forest, the carrying capacity is about 60 trees per acre.”

In a typical acre of unmaintained urban woodland, Isaac may see 300 to 600 trees – up to ten times the ideal density. The result of this overcrowding is trees that grow tall and at angles as they grow toward limited available light. These trees tend to have small canopies due to crowded conditions.  Isaac’s team recently began work in a city park near the Fayetteville Public Library with a crowded second-growth forest and dense colony of invasive plants.

“The arts corridor is a woodland that was highly degraded.  It’s a hiding place for critters, but it’s not sustaining anything,” he says. “And it’s actually in the process of dying. If nobody does anything, it will become unrecognizable to the nature that knows it.”

Faced with decades of neglect and an onslaught of invasive plants, woodlands may need drastic intervention to give native plants and animals a chance. When we’ve become accustomed to the look of degraded forests, the best management practices might appear to be destructive at first glance.

“We use whatever is in the toolbox,” Isaac says. “If it’s a chainsaw, a track machine with a mulcher head on it, if it’s a backpack sprayer with selective herbicide – we use whatever we need to get rid of plants that don’t belong.”

When invasive plants are removed, native plants often spring up from seeds that have waited for years for the right conditions. Isaac assisted the Northwest Arkansas Land Trust with one such area, the newly opened Wilson Springs Preserve. Before restoration began, a dense understory of honeysuckle was so thick that under it was only mud – no grasses or flowers or young trees. After the honeysuckle was removed, the earth exploded with new life.

Isaac doesn’t call his work in city parks or new development “restoration” – that’s a term he reserves for landscapes like Wilson Springs, which are carefully curated to recreate conditions before human settlement. But it’s not an all-or-nothing situation.

“Really what you are trying to do is to build a balance – you can have it both ways,” he says.  “There are plenty of good examples of biodiversity being supported by smart development. These can be decades-long processes, depending on how degraded the site is. You can get in there and clean it up in one to three years, but really it’s year seven, eight, nine, and ten when you see the efforts paying off. It’s a big-time long term commitment.”