Eastern Mixed Mesophytic Forest Restoration

Pennsylvania. D the winter of 1992-93, the Pennypack Ecological Restoration Trust began a project to restore a forested 1.5hectare tract of mixed mesophytic forest called the Overlook Woods on the Trust’s 324-hectare Pennypack Wilderness preserve. Located in the suburbs adjacent to northeastern Philadelphia, the Wilderness protects a mosaic of successional old-fields, red maple (Acer rubrum) and red cedar (Juniperus vir~niana) thickets, young woodlands dominated by white ash (Fraxinus americana) and tulip trees (Lirioden. dron tulipifera), and stands of mature mixed-mesophytic forest, of which the Overlook Woods is an example. The Trust’s general goal for the Overlook Woods, as it is for all the woodlands in the Wilderness, is to restore an ecosystem of species native to the Pennypack Creek valley that will be self-regenerating and require minimal continuing stewardship. Since 1989, the Trust has used the Wilderness as an outdoor laboratory and demonstration site for testing and demonstrating techniques for managing succession and for ecological restoration. In 1991 and 1992, for example, the Trust’s staff coordinated research on control of exotic plants for a consortium of natural-areas managers in southeastern Pennsylvania. In addition, Trust personnel have worked with James F. Th0me from the University of Pennsylvania and JeanMarie Hartman from Rutgers University in research on old-field succession in the Wilderness. The Overlook Woods restoration project draws on such previous research, and also on the experience we have gained in planting over 4,500 trees in five separate reforestation projects that have been done in the Wilderness over the years to address many questions related to temperate deciduous-forest restoration in a single project. Most natural-area managers who work in urban areas now recognize that permanent and continuous stewardship and, in some cases, outright restoration are an inescapable reality, given the disruptive influence of the urban environment what ecologist Dan Janzen has called "the eternal, external threat" (Janzen, 1986). All of the mature forests in the Wilderness, like urbanized forests throughout the northern Piedmont, are in decline. The Overlook Woods project is notable because the Woods is a microcosm of the problems common in urbanized Eastern forests, and the attempt to restore it should provide information that will be useful to forest restorationists throughout the northern Piedmont.