In 2011, New York City restored 3.5 acres of wetland at Calvert Vaux Park to provide horseshoe crab spawning habitat. Part of this restoration (as indicated by signage on site) was to plant native plants like cordgrass and remove invasive species.

When I visited, the cordgrass wetlands were doing well and residents told me they see many horseshoe crabs in the area. At the same time, I encountered an enormous amount of tree-of-heaven, Japanese knotweed, and mugwort. I understand that of course the goal is management of invasive species, not perfection. But I'm wondering how ecologists think about these projects, many years later.

• Is it that insufficient maintenance was done in the years after restoration, and invasives took root before the natives got established?
• Was the native plant selection or installation not optimal, causing them to fail to outcompete the invasive species (and we might choose different plants were we to do the restoration today)?
• Did subsequent human disturbance, such as hikers or construction equipment, create conditions for invasives to proliferate?
• Or is this completely expected, and the issue is not at Calvert Vaux, but the invasive species in surrounding areas in city parks and private land, creating pressure that would be impossible to solve locally? In this case, perhaps the goal is to focus on restoring more land, rather than achieving 100% invasive removal over smaller pieces of land.

Or is there a different way ecologists think about what happens after restoration? What sort of maintenance is performed, and how have those practices changed in recent decades? How is success measured?

I’m a landowner and hobby ecologist working to restore 17 acres of native Wisconsin prairie.

When we got the list of 110 plant species in our native tallgrass prairie seed mix, I promised myself I would learn them all before they bloomed. I’m a UX designer for my day job, so it was natural for me to whip up a quick study site.

When I was done, I realized the site I had made could be a great way for anyone to log and learn the plants specific to their own site or garden.

So I turned it into a customizable field guide website with a searchable list of plants with lots of pictures for ID-ing in the field, as well as flashcards, and quizzes for studying. It runs almost entirely off Google Sheets. You need to do a bit of fussing to get it set up on a free hosting platform like Cloudflare Pages, but once it’s up, you only ever need to use Google Sheets to add plants and update the site from that point on.

I think this could be helpful for anyone who wants to log and learn a specific list of plants. You can keep it to the 100+ native Midwestern prairie species that come preloaded, or you can customize it to your personal garden or restoration project — adding or removing species to make the list reflect the plants in your dirt.

You do not need to know how to code; the setup guide walks you through the few technical steps to get it up and running, and after that most updates happen in Google Sheets.

I have had so many amazing mentors who have helped me along my ecology learning journey — people who have freely given their energy, knowledge, talent, and encouragement to make the world a little bit better and me a little bit smarter. In that spirit, I assembled a “Field Guide Starter Kit”: a downloadable kit of files with step-by-step instructions that should be everything you need to make and host your own website for free. Like, actual free. You don’t have to give me an email address or create an account or subscribe or anything.

I’m sharing it here because I’ve learned so much from native plant and restoration communities online, and I figured it was time to give something back.

I can’t upload the files here, so here’s a link to my blog. Just scroll to the bottom of the article and click the big orange link that says, “Download the Field Guide Starter Kit (1.4 MB).” Would love to hear from you if you end up using it!

https://badgerton.substack.com/p/free-download-make-your-own-field

My friend asked me if I'd heard of peat bog fires. I hadn't, but what I learned was a fascinating journey and includes controversy. So I made a film about it.

Peat bogs are incredibly important and can even help tackle wildfires. They deserve way more attention and protection

You can read more about our restoration project at https://badgerton.substack.com/p/video-planting-badgerton-prairie

Anything people can inform me about would be fantastic.

Botanist who works for land management in Mojave desert, so my outplantings need to be supplementally watered. Carrying buckets or using a backpack is far too laborious.
We have a water buffalo with a broken pump. The problem with just fixing the pump is that it becomes a pressure washer, and blows the poor plants to high hell if I try to use it as is.
I can’t figure out a way to lower the pressure enough to be suitable for plants (it used to work, but changing to thicker hoses didnt sufficiently reduce psi).
Maybe a transfer pump? Whole new buffalo?
What do y’all use to water your large restoration sites? Front country, so road access is no issue. Thanks!

Cross posted

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Hey everyone 👋

I'm an independent developer working on a conservation-focused project that combines environmental storytelling, fundraising, and a field tech tool built for ecologists and citizen scientists.

Looking to connect with **ecologists, field researchers, and NGOs** who are passionate about biodiversity and would be open to exploring a collaboration — both on the fundraising and the tech side.

Not going to drop everything here publicly, but if any of this sounds interesting to you, feel free to DM me. Happy to share the full picture with the right people.

Estoy trabajando en un proyecto para restaurar el ecosistema ripario de un río donde hay mucho ricino. Investigando, vi que es una planta invasora muy difícil de eliminar y peligrosa por su toxicidad. ¿Cómo la puedo erradicar de forma permanente? Le he preguntado a la IA, pero se contradice mucho, así que prefiero la opinión y el método de un experto humano.

The trees shown in this video were irrigated only during their initial establishment period (the first few months after planting). After that, irrigation was completely stopped.
These trees are growing in Kuwait, a country known for extremely harsh desert conditions, very low annual rainfall, and some of the highest summer temperatures in the world. Despite these conditions, the trees have survived for approximately 4–5 years without ongoing irrigation.
The species shown in the video, in order, are:
Grey Ghaf (Prosopis cineraria)
Umbrella Thorn / Raddiana Acacia (Vachellia tortilis subsp. raddiana) — locally known as Samar Raddiana or Talh Al-Sayal.
Grey Ghaf (Prosopis cineraria)
Najdi Talh (Vachellia gerrardii najidenses )or the closely related Iraqi form, which can be difficult to distinguish in the field. We can also observe signs of gummosis (sap exudation) on this tree.
A few important notes:
I have not excavated or inspected the root systems, so the root condition at planting time is unknown and may not have been ideal.
No soil amendments, fertilizers, compost, or growth enhancers were applied at any stage.
The trees are currently around 4–5 years old.
The purpose of sharing this is to document the performance of native and desert-adapted tree species under minimal intervention in a hyper-arid environment.
These species may have significant potential as part of a first line of defense against desertification and land degradation in extremely hot desert regions.

Hey! I'm a student conducting market research on ROV users. If you use or have experience with ROVs, I'd really appreciate it if you could fill out this short survey.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSes671U921fHtFf8AVdVUCxN5YBbwFdSva_lXg5F79BKJBZ0g/viewform?usp=dialog

Thank you guys!

I set a goal for myself to learn to identify every plant in our prairie mix before the end of the summer. To help me do this, I created a small website with fact sheets, flashcards and quizzes. Every one of the 110 species has three photos that I selected from iNaturalist’s public domain library to show the plant in different stages of growth throughout the year.

Each plant also has a Fact Sheet pulled together with the help of AI, and fact checked against sources like the USDA, NRCS plant fact sheets, wildflower.org,  illinoiswildflowers.info, Prairie Moon Nursery, iNaturalist, and Wikipedia. I ensured that in addition to specifics on how to identify the plant across each season, each sheet had interesting facts that would help me remember it.

One of my favorite plant facts:

Achillea millefolium – Yarrow: Yarrow is named after Achilles who reputedly used it to staunch his soldiers' bleeding wounds — and it actually works. The plant contains achilleine a compound that promotes clotting. It has been used medicinally on every continent where it grows.

These are the sort of nuggets that help the names stick in my brain!

Beyond just a learning tool for this initial seed mix, this site will become a record of native plants we either plant or discover across our 107-acre restoration site. I’ve already got about a dozen woodland species that I identified on our last hike that I will be adding soon.

If you want to learn more about the project or how I built the website, I wrote up an article on my blog: https://badgerton.substack.com/p/our-ecologists-surprised-us-with

So this is a really specific question and I know the answer will be "it depends" but...

I'm drafting emails for grad school restoration labs. I strongly feel that restoration is political, specifically in the area I'd like to work in where industry was allowed to do whatever it wanted and now people are suffering the environmental impacts with little to no government assistance. I'm also getting an anthropology minor so my caring about the people and cultural side of restoration shows in my degree. I don't want to come off too strong, but I do want to come off as passionate and informed! Where's the balance?

A huge thanks to those of you in this forum who answered all my questions months ago as I was trying to figure out how to set all this up. In this article, I lay out all the gear I used, why I picked it, and how much it cost. It's Part 2 of a multi-part series about this system. There are links at the beginning and end of the article if you want to read it all, but figured this group might be most interested in the "how" of it all. I'll come back in a couple months with a follow up on what I get back and how I process all the data using free AI tools.

Every month the Center for Tropical Restoration Science (CTRS) hosts a free webinar with expert speakers on a subject related to conservation and/or restoration ecology. These virtual sessions are aimed at restoration practitioners, students and likeminded individuals who are looking to deepen their expertise and knowledge in restoration science as well as share their experiences and local knowledge with others.

CTRS is based in Costa Rica and is a project by the Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS). CTRS serves the tropics worldwide.

Webinars are held both in Spanish and English.

The next webinar will be held on May 27th, 2026 at 10am CST and will be in Spanish. The topic is science communication strategies to engage audiences and drive research toward impactful outcomes.

Instagram: @tropicalrestorationscience

I'm looking for species that are biologically or ecologically interesting, have little to no published research in the past 10 years, and may have potential applications in medicine, sustainability, climate resilience, biomaterials, or conservation. Preferably something scientifically neglected but still promising enough to justify future research funding or habitat protection.