Treating Invasives at Richard T. Anderson Conservation Area

By Jaycie Korth, Energy Corps/ AmeriCorps Member

For the past 2 weeks, my crew and I have had the opportunity to be a part of a 3-week project with Eden Prairie Forestry removing invasive plant species at the Richard T. Anderson Conservation Area. The conservation area consists of 125 acres of woodlands, prairies, and vistas with beautiful trails and lookouts over Rice Lake and the Minnesota River! Don’t worry, we are not covering all 125 acres on 3 weeks! We are only working in a small section.

On the first day, the whole area shown in red was filled with buckthorn! You couldn’t see or imagine that a prairie was supposed to be there with how overgrown this invasive species had gotten. But my crew and I have been working hard through heat and mosquitoes, and we’ve been making a lot of progress!

Buckthorn is an invasive plant that was originally brought to Minnesota to make hedges, however they form dense thickets in forests, parks, pretty much anywhere it can grow. The fact they outcompete our native plants and deprive them of light, nutrients and moisture, as well as don’t have any natural insects or diseases that impact their growth, threatens our natural habitats that can get overgrown. There are multiple ways to manage buckthorn, which can be found on the Minnesota DNR website.

Using brush saws to cut the plant to the stump and hand dabbing chemicals, we’ve made quite a dent in the buckthorn!

We still have a couple more days of work to get everything cut and dabbed, and so far so good.