BTC's Prairie Restoration Project

The southern edge of Blackhawk Technical College's Central Campus property was pasture land and had apparently never been cultivated leaving the majority of the native prairie plants there.  Since Blackhawk has owned the property, the area has become overgrown with invasive plants, mainly invasive European ornamental shrubs such as honeysuckle and buckthorn.  Over the years, a few people have worked to try to preserve it with this latest project getting started in 2004 by Chris Wellington and Nancy Lightfield.

Since 2004, we have had numerous work days, some formally organized and some very spur of the moment when the weather was good and people were available.  As of the fall of 2009, the open area for the growth of prairie plants has probably been doubled by cutting and burning the invasives.  In the fall of 2009, two Boy Scout Eagle projects were completed greatly improving the access and usability of the prairie. 

Work Day:  We had a total of 7 people out for the work day on Saturday, November 14.  We managed to burn much of the western half of the prairie as well as a lot of Honeysuckle and Buckthorn that had been cut.  We also cut and burned a bit more Honeysuckle and Buckthorn and seeded an area that was cleared with seeds collected from the better parts of the prairie..

Following are some links to information about the prairie project.

WACTE ConTech's newsletter (pdf file) has an article on page 7 with photos on page 8 which talks about the history of the prairie and what has been happening to restore it.

Air Photo is a Word document which has aerial photos of the prairie area taken about April of 2005 on which I've marked trails to be developed and burn sites for burning brush

Updated Air Photo is the above Word document where I've added orange shading to the larger areas that have been cleared out since we started work on restoring the prairie.  There are a lot of individual bushes that have been removed which I haven't circled.

May 2008 Air photos:  These are two air photos that were taken by Peter Bales from Trade Wind International, LLC located at the airport.  They don't quite match up with the air photos above, but you can see a LOT of open area that wasn't there before.

1950 and 1969 Air Photos:  These are copies from the overflights on file at the Rock County Surveyor's office in Janesville with some description.

November 17, 2007 work day is a PowerPoint presentation about what we did on this work day.

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