Carol Davis (at far left) has been leading service projects once a month since May for volunteers, many of whom are from the NRV Master Naturalists, to aid in restoring the ecology of the Town of Blacksburg’s Heritage Park.
Sometimes, affecting change is challenging. Other times it can be a walk in the park – literally.
The Virginia Tech Restoration Ecology Working Group in the Global Change Center has been instrumental in helping the Town of Blacksburg restore Heritage Park to its native ecology.
Led by J. Leighton Reid, assistant professor in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences, this group of 11 faculty members spans five colleges and seven departments. Its members are focused on building relationships across specialties to provide equitable benefits and services to ecologically restore communities across the globe — and especially in their own backyards.
The Restoration Ecology Working Group, along with the Invasive Species Collaborative and the Virginia Tech StREAM Lab, provided key guidance when the town applied for a grant from the Virginia Environmental Endowment, said Carol Davis, sustainability manager for the Town of Blacksburg. Awarded in May, the $230,000 grant will fund restoration of 17 acres of Heritage Park.
“Specifically, Leighton Reid has been a key informal advisor to the town as we have conceptualized approaches to conservation, restoration, and stewardship of our public lands – and not just at Heritage Park,” Davis said.
On Aug. 13, the town passed an ordinance to accept the terms of the grant and appropriate the money, and on one Monday morning each month since and for the next year they hold a service project in leading volunteers in assisting with the restoration project.
To cultivate such relationships, the working group held an Ecological and Biocultural Restoration Summit this spring, which was supported by the Global Change Center and the Institute for Society, Culture, and Environment. During the summit, Reid led not only faculty, administrators, and graduate and undergraduate students but also regional partners in discussing how to make large-scale restoration projects more socially equitable and how to build up student training programs.
“I feel that the Ecological and Biocultural Restoration Summit was extremely beneficial because it gave a wide variety of perspectives on restoration concepts, ideas, and projects,” said Dean Crane, director of Blacksburg Parks and Recreation. “The collaborative relationship that the town has with the Restoration Ecology Working Group is a wonderful resource to the town: before, during, and after a project. They have a tremendous amount of expertise and resources that can assist in making town projects even better.”
For ecological restoration to be successful, every aspect of an ecosystem must be addressed: the plant, soil, water, animal, insect, and human factors. This interconnectedness also must be present among the practitioners and researchers working across disciplines to make it happen. And their interconnections and relationships don’t end at the edge of Virginia Tech’s campus – they branch out as though from a firmly rooted tree.
“We’ve got a faculty core that extends across campus, and then each of us has our own network that extends to restoration that’s happening all over the world,” said Reid, who is also an affiliated faculty with the Fralin Life Sciences Institute. “I’m working with a group in Ecuador, one in Madagascar, a few in Virginia, and I know that everyone in the group could name that many different organizations that they’re affiliated with too.”
To branch out beyond Blacksburg and build relationships globally, the group is focusing on education. One important accomplishment has been the creation of a College of Agriculture and Life Sciences major in ecological restoration, which is the first one in the country to be formally aligned and certified by the Society for Ecological Restoration, a conservation network that boasts of more than 5,000 members in more than 100 countries.
“It’s a pretty big international organization,” Reid said. “Our students graduate with all the knowledge requirements and training of a certified ecological restoration practitioner-in-training.”
The group is also hoping to extend its reach into graduate education.
“We have people who are working in all these relevant disciplines for this social ecological problem, so we have started setting our sights on some bigger training grants,” Reid said.
Looking ahead, Reid emphasizes the importance of bringing more expertise in biocultural restoration and in particular, in the experiences of local and Indigenous communities doing restoration. To achieve this, the group has recently been awarded a Destination Area 2.0 grant.
For more information about the Heritage Park restoration project, see the Town of Blacksburg website.
Lindsey Haugh for Virginia Tech