Muir Woods to undergo ecological facelift

A walk in Muir Woods with Glenda Denniston quickly turns into a zigzag scramble from every tree to shrub to wildflower. She snaps photos every few seconds, excitedly musing on every green thing around.

Denniston holds a UW–Madison doctoral degree in anthropology, but spends every daylight hour far from humans. Most days she roams UW–Madison’s 350 acres of natural woods, wetlands, prairie and open fields, removing invasive species, planting native species and photographing everything in sight.

The vice president of the citizen group Friends of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, Denniston is a front-runner among a battalion of ardent nature lovers on and around campus. Devoted volunteers like her will be an integral part of a new Muir Woods restoration effort that kicked off this month.

The Muir Woods-East Lakeshore Path Project aims to refurbish walking trails and address ecological headaches such as storm water runoff, erosion and invasive species. The initiative – largely enabled by a gift from the UW–Madison class of 1963 – simultaneously aims to develop a long-term ecological management plan that will serve as a working template for future restoration efforts, says Catherine Bruner, manager of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, which represents the university’s natural spaces and was formerly known as the Campus Natural Areas.

The Muir Woods work will be a first step toward a phased restoration of most of UW–Madison’s natural lands.

“There’s so much to save and protect here,” says Bruner. “And because [Muir Woods] is a public space we want people to feel connected to it.” To that end, anyone in the Madison community can lend a hand to restoration efforts. Four trail-building volunteer days, for instance, are scheduled for early September.

Notably, graduate students will steer the Muir Woods makeover. “It’s a great way to integrate education with [ecological] management,” Bruner says. Rebecca Kagle, a land resources graduate student focusing on restoration ecology, is the first student to take the helm. Prior to arriving in Madison, Kagle spent several years managing a large public park in Brooklyn, New York.

Kagle plans to spend the summer setting up a grid system that will help her assess soil use patterns and the distribution of trees, shrubs and herbaceous species in the Muir Woods area. She says other priorities include the design of a new user-friendly trail system and the strategic relocation of fallen logs to help divert storm water. In the fall, Kagle intends to organize large-scale volunteer days to uproot invasive species, line trails and pick up trash.

“By me being a body here all the time, people will know that the Muir Woods is being taken care of,” says Kagle. “I want this project to be as inclusive and open as possible.”

Nestled within the UW campus, the Muir Woods stretch seven acres from Observatory Drive to the Howard Temin Lakeshore Path. Native Americans frequented the area for hundreds of years, leaving important archeological artifacts in their wake. Later, during UW–Madison’s early years, students often heated their dorm rooms with Muir Woods firewood. Now, Bruner says, the woods are a natural classroom for zoology, geology, botany and even philosophy students reflecting on the “meaning of nature.”