Thicket Mapping at Homestead National Monument

2012 Homestead National Monument Thicket Map

Homestead National Monument of America was established to tell the story of  the Homestead Act. While the monument tells the story of homesteaders, they also strive to show to visitors what the tall grass prairie would have looked like to those original homesteaders. Therefor the monument has over the last decade began to monitor and remove woody species that would not have been in the tall grass prairie of the past. Smooth Sumac (Rhus) covers almost 24 acres of the 120 acres of tall grass prairie. Dogwood (Cornus) is the other big issue species. Plum (Prunus), Ash (Fraxinus) and Elderberry (Sambucus) are also present as thickets. There are also a small umber of trees such as Eastern Cedar, some other deciduous trees and quite a few Honeylocust. The numbers that are in the key, 1-4 refer to the density of each thicket. Thickets rated a with a number 1 are the thickest and 4 are the thinnest. At present 34 acres of the prairie are currently covered by thicket. Mapping has been done about 5 times in the last 10 years. This year I was the one that did all of the mapping. I used a Trimble GPS with an external antenna attached to a back pack I wore. I had to identify  thicket species and density and then walk around the perimeter of each thicket. The data was then downloaded and Natural Resource Specialist Jess Bolli made the map that is at the beginning of this blog. Once the location and density of the thickets is recorded, treatment and removal can begin. Numerous different treatment methods have been tried including foliage treatment with different chemicals and also the cut and spray  treatment method. Much thought is put into choosing chemicals and treatment methods. The monument wants to control the amount of tickets present on the prairie while causing no harm to wildlife or desirable native plants. For this season, both foliage and cut and spray methods are being employed. So, for any of you that have visited the prairie, all of the red areas are dogwood and sumac thickets that have been treated by chemicals applied to the foliage. Starting this week I will be out in the prairie beginning with cut and spray treatment of some of the thinner thickets. Hopefully the treatment this year will stop the spread of the thickets and perhaps it will even begin to shrink the size of the thickets. Homestead National Monument is committed to showing all its visitors what the tall grass prairie would have looked like to the homesteaders just arriving in the area.