Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[music]
[Announcer] Chicago is a city of green -
a city that safeguards its precious environment.
Welcome to "Chicago at Play."
[music]
[Music]
[Announcer] The Burnham Centennial Prairie restoration project is underway
combining the art of implementation with the science
of restoration to provide a flourishing habitat the city
will enjoy for years to come.
[Zhanna Yermakov] One of the goals of the Chicago Park District is to naturalize
as many areas as we can and really increase the number
of acres that we have
and always improve the natural areas program.
So this project, the planting
at Burnham Park is the largest natural area planting
that we have ever done.
It's more than 30 acres, it's actually larger
than the planting that we did at Northerly Island.
[George Milner] What the Park District wanted was a prairie area
that was a little more aesthetically pleasing than some
of the prairies that they've had in the past
that were really grass dominated
and really didn't have a lot of color.
[Announcer] Restoration ecologists from V3 and Aramark were brought
in to determine the effectiveness
of different seeding methods on native community diversity.
[George Milner] We started kind of thinking how to actually achieve that
and the first thing we did was well we started looking
at the seed mixes and a lot of the seed mixes
that are available in the industry are very high
in grasses and low in forbs so you're basically seeding more
of a grassland type community
and that's really not what the Park District wanted,
they wanted something that had more diverse wild flowers
and they wanted to have color throughout the growing season.
[Music]
Some areas we seeded everything in the fall
and then we seeded everything in the spring.
And then we actually did a duel seeding where some
of the species that needed to be fall seeded were seeded
in the fall and the species that needed
to be spring seeded were seeded in the spring.
And we buried all of the seed versus burying some
and did some surface seeding on some so we wanted to kind
of evaluate are we actually going
to see some different results using those different methods.
[Zhanna Yermakov] Most people when they look at this place,
they don't really see the native plants but when you look
down the ground and you search
for these plants we have already identified 19 species
that we planted last year, this has never happened before,
we have never had such a successful planting in terms
of diversity in the number of species, native species
that we have found so we are very excited about the success
of this project so far.
[George Milner] In the first year you're not going
to see much of prairie plants.
You will see some little, tiny, some of the forbs will germinate
and they'll be very small.
You know, after the second year you'll start to see more forbs
and those species
that germinated the first year will actually get bigger
in the second year.
Then really it takes probably three to five years that I
like to say before you really start seeing a good community
of prairie plants.
[Announcer] An important element for native plant growth is mycorrhizae,
a fungus that provides nutrients
to plants wherein the plants supplies carbon
for the fungi to grow.
[Zhanna Yermakov] One of the experiments that DePaul is involved
in is actually trying to see if introducing the fungi
into the soil with the seeding is helpful if the source
of fungi is important.
So Indiana University has created a mix of fungi,
native fungi that they actually extracted
from native prairie soils, so we're trying
to compare whether there's a difference
between sources commercial mycorrhizae,
these native sources of mycorrhizae and actually,
not introducing any mycorrhizae at all.
Will there be a difference in three to five years
between the plantings.
[Announcer] A grant from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative will
support the Burnham Centennial Prairie research study,
which hopes to influence future restoration practices.
[Zhanna Yermakov] We really want our plantings and our restorations to be
as successful as they can be.
We want them to be of very high quality ecologically
and we really want them to be very beautiful for the people
who enjoy these areas.
We understand that the more beautiful these areas are the
more opportunities we will have in the future
to create projects like this.
So we're very much hoping that the outcome of this experiment
and all this research is going to yield the results
that will be very helpful
in our decision making in the future.