The Greene County Conservation Board recently announced a grant to help out one of their wildlife areas.

Conservation Director Tanner Scheuermann says they applied for and received an Iowa Forest Resiliency Partnership Program of a $83,900 grant, with a match to be provided by other local organizations. Scheuermann points out that he worked with their Iowa Department of Natural Resources District Forester, Aaron Wright, and they identified a portion of land in the Ruth Hanson Wildlife Area near Rippey to help re-establish forest resiliency and health.

“We all know, we’ve undergone a lot of derechoes, and tornadoes, and diseases like the Emerald Ash Borer and a number of other things that have kind of putting a hurt and kind of created some of these gaps in big expanses of timber that unfortunately fill up with our nasty evasive species like honeysuckle and allamall. So we want to try to go in there and make sure that doesn’t happen and replant some more desirable bottom land species in that area.”   

Scheuermann talks about a previous direct nut seeding project that the Greene County Conservation Board did in 2017 within the same location as where they are going to do another part of the project to help the overall survivability of the timber.

“Which instead of planting seedling and saplings, they literally went out and spread a bunch of walnuts, and acorns, and things like that out, rolled it all in, and that planting is awesome. It looks really good. Starting to get a lot of encroachment from the cottonwoods that are of course native to the area, that stuff grows like weeds. So a part of the project as well is to go in and do some thinning there and kind of do some crop (tree) and release and release some of those oaks and stuff that are in there now and get them in a good position to grow into nice beautiful trees. 

Scheuermann adds that this project will not tax his department staff as the Iowa DNR District Forester is responsible for setting up the contractors, who will do the work. He is appreciative of the funding to help with some natural resource conservation management in the county.