A strategy to recover and maintain long-term ecological health
The City of Woodbury has an extensive park and open space system—encompassing hundreds of acres of woodlands, wetlands, and prairies—but an agricultural history and encroachment by invasive plants have left many of these natural areas in poor ecological health. The city turned to Barr to develop a prioritized, scheduled, and budgeted plan to systematically restore and promote native plant diversity.
Barr began by facilitating internal workshops to gather knowledge and restoration priorities from city staff. We combined this information with relevant spatial and field-investigation data to assess and describe the existing ecological quality of 30 selected open spaces from across the city.
The resulting management plan prioritizes areas of high ecological quality—with the intent to preserve existing native plant diversity—and calls for actions to suppress invasive species, expand native plant communities, and maintain those communities through routine management.
Once the priority areas are restored and advanced to long-term management, the city will move on to the next level of priority. Eventually, all sites will have been restored and undergoing regular management to avoid the need for intensive restoration in the future, saving significant costs in the long run. Barr developed 20-year restoration and management plans as well as cost spreadsheets for each site so that city staff can budget and prepare for ecological management long into the future.