Protecting the Purchase Preserve. by Robyn Graygor
October 01, 2024
Open gallery
From June 3 to August 2, the summer of 2024, I worked as one of three field technicians in a three-year DEC grant funded forest restoration project on Purchase College campus. Back in 2022, a strip of old growth forest in the Southeast corner of campus was clearcut to install a sewer line to Broadview leaving the ecosystem vulnerable to invasive species takeover. I was tasked with developing a forest restoration response which would effectively prepare for the next two years of research to come.
The other technicians and I worked on a variety of projects to begin recording data on the site; we established five 100 m transects, geotagged all trees with a DBH above 12.7 cm, deployed 15 spotted lanternfly traps in the site (and 15 elsewhere on campus), grew native restoration plants, and created walking trails leading to the site and within the site itself. While we did allocate time to these efforts, the majority of our responsibilities involved manually removing invasive vegetation from the cut area using loppers (and within a 10 m border around the cut area). The amount of invasive biomass removed from the site each day far exceeded a truck bed or two and was mainly composed of multiflora rose (rosa multiflora). This invasive rose is extremely resilient and aggressive, so managing it alongside the forest edge was our highest priority.
By the end of the summer, we had successfully removed and documented the invasive species in and around the cut area, providing suitable habitat for the restoration plants we had been growing. Since this was the first year of a three-year long study, I look forward to seeing how our efforts will pay off. I suspect that with enough careful monitoring we could close this invasive pathway into our old growth riparian forest and have a real restoration success on our hands!