CLOSED: Your help needed.

Our local county park rake and burn a large portion of the forest each year. We would like to address some of the correct forest management issues with the park manager. I know beneficial insects, bad insects, butterflies and moths lay next year eggs on foliage. Could I use this as part of our presentation to ask for better forest management practices; that is 1. allowing the foliage to be used as cover for wildlife and insects 2. to break down naturally over the winter and put the nutrients back into the soil. Any ideas as to the ID would be helpful.

But why do they burn? Our county has burned to control invasive non-natives .

Our park manager burns because the foliage kills the grass. He thinks people who go into the woods don't like leaves on the ground. He is slowly making a gold course out of a beautiful wooded area.

That does surprise me. I wonder if its his idea, or somebody else's...most of our parks don't have enough money for more than what's absolutely necessary.

Mgarr, you'd be surprised how many people actually feel that way. They are morons.

Mgarr, you might also point out to the park manager that burning leaves puts a lot of particulate-matter pollution into the air, which keeps many people with respiratory problems from coming outdoors and enjoying the park.

Given the well-recognized importance of fallen leaves and other components of a forest/woodland litter layer in soil development, water conservation, and erosion control, I am completely baffled at the park manager's policy. The following statement was distilled from several articles on woodlot/forestry management: A well-developed litter layer of decaying leaves, branches, and twigs intercepts and absorbs most of the rainfall that reaches the forest floor; storing some for plant use by slow filtering through the soil as well as sending more of it underground to streams, thus minimizing surface runoff and soil erosion.

The small things on the leaves look like very young snails of some sort, which of course help to turn vegetable matter into food for utilisation by plants.

Again there may be the benefits of having charcoal in the ground - they doesn't decompose rapidly and keep carbon in the ground instead of the air and studies show that they holds nutrients for plants. Another study talk about a unusually rich soil area in the Amazon rainforest (most rainforest soil is very poor in nutrients or humus - decay is very rapid and rains bleach and washes the nutrients out of the soil) that turn out to comes from charcoals and burn bones - this is a new idea, just a few years old. Ashes is different from charcoal - ashes have too much phosphorus and burns plants - you can tell the difference - ashes are whitish and charcoal is black.

Otherwise, I would had prefer to keep the leaves on the ground as leaves keep the water from leaving the ground slowly and also it helps many woodland wild plants but I bet there's noting but invasive and weedy plants anyway in your park- most parks (city parks, suburban parks, even large parks adjust to cities are bad while state parks and national parks are mostly intact) are a hotbed for invasive species since there are voids created after habitation destruction had already happened (farms is often the first to move in a wilderness area - my house used to be in a area where horses are kept but now it's a dense suburban site - the farms are destroyed and the wilderness often moves in quickly - in 5 to 10 years you won't know there are any trace of farms except for ditches and the large amount of weedy species)

I forgot to add wildlife perserves - along with large parks, they tend to be half invasive, half intact wilderness as they tend to acquire former properties.

That is cool info. I found 135 native plants at the part last year. Some never before found in our county. In the fall I found almost 200 mushrooms and fungi, all in areas where most people don't go. Where the foliage is raked up we have garlic mustard, rosa multiflora, hay scented fern and bracken fern. There is sadly no charcoal. I know meadows need a good burn for wildflowers to grow healthy, this is not why leaves are burned in our park. The foliage kills the grass!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It sounds like you have good 'ammo' already to protest the burning. Too bad there aren't more like minded parks visitors like you to help the cause.

Deers also make a major pest gardener - they eat the good plants and help spread grasses in the woods.

The park I'm talking about had large flocks of wild turkey. They were all over eating along with two groups of deer. There was so many native plants I had to look up some to check out their true names. The raking upset shallow rooted plants or plants that were just getting a hold. The raking killed a large area of May apples. That is hard to do. The harsh raking and then burning changes the pH in the soil and leaves no way to replenish the soil and there is no blanket for winter's harsh weather. I'm sad.

Oh my god - that many deer in such a small park!! And yet that is the norm - I have seen deer in fenced properties that is only a few acres and you had to wonder how they kept from interbreeding. And mayapple tend to be poisonous for deers but they will eat anything in the crowded environment. A pity you can't adopt the park or with a local organization.