Wild Things 2025

To restore oak savannas, ecosystem stewards and managers cut invasive brush and thin trees, creating woody debris brush piles that are subsequently burned. With approximately 5,000 brush piles built and burned annually in the Chicago region, the ecological restoration community is concerned about the effects of burn scars on regional biodiversity and interested in developing strategies for minimizing these impacts. In response, we established a series of studies to 1) characterize short- and long-term effects of brush pile burns on plant and soil biodiversity; 2) identify the management choices that minimize or maximize these effects; and 3) evaluate post-burn strategies for mitigating brush pile burning effects on biodiversity. In this session, we will discuss current findings from a large-scale survey, a chronosequence study, and a restoration treatment experiment.