This story is part of our series, Wild Pennsylvania. Check out all of our stories here.
Lake Pleasant in northwestern Pennsylvania was created over 15,000 years ago when a glacier retreated. Since the 1990s, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy has been buying and conserving land around the lake, which supports rare plants and birds like herons and osprey. The lake is part of the headwaters of French Creek, an important habitat for freshwater mussels, including some endangered species.
Now, a nonprofit is helping the conservancy reforest a problem area on the property to create wildlife habitat and improve water quality.
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The nonprofit, Bosland Growth, is planting 70,000 trees at the conservancy’s Lake Pleasant Conservation Area in Erie County this spring. That’s no small feat on these 100 acres of the property, which the conservancy purchased in 2006. It was once a gravel mine.
“The regulations require the companies to return the landscape to relatively the same contours that they had been before mining,” said Michael Knoop, vice president of Bosland Growth. “To do that, they have to use heavy equipment that compacts the soil a lot more than is healthy for trees to grow in.”
Bosland Growth partners with landowners like the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy to reforest land. The conservancy is Bosland’s first partner.
To treat the compacted soil and prepare it for planting, Knoop said last fall, a contractor ripped down into the ground about three feet with machinery, creating a checkerboard pattern across the landscape. Invasive plant species like autumn olive and multiflora rose were also removed from the site.
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The value of forest land
Today, Knoop is leading a group of project partners and guests towards two experimental plots on the property, where they’re testing different ways to improve the tree growth.
A team of workers, swinging hoedads, long spades used to make a hole in the ground, and popping in the trees. Most are only 8 to 12 inches high.
Some of the trees include white pine, black locust, scarlet oak and red maple. In the bottom land, swamp white oak, sycamores and silky dogwood are planted because, Knoop said, they like to get their feet wet.
There’s already water on the property. The former mine is dotted with small ponds – pits left by the mining company.
“They’re not natural and they really shouldn’t be here,” Andy Zadnik, director of land stewardship for Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, said.
He called Lake Pleasant a gem, the finest example of an inland glacial lake in the state. It’s mainly fed by groundwater, so the water collecting in these pits could be impacting the water chemistry and temperature in the nearby lake.
The pits are also infested with an invasive aquatic plant called Eurasian watermilfoil. The conservancy is treating the ponds for the plant, which hasn’t made it to the lake yet.
“We’re taking a really long-term view,” Zadnik said. “We’re hoping that if we can restore a healthy forest on this property in time, these pits might start to fill in or become more scrub-shrub wetlands and less open water areas.”
Experimental plots on the land
In the shorter term, the reforestation partners are hoping for a 70% survival rate for the trees over the next few years. Bosland Growth needs these trees to grow. It’s selling carbon credits from the trees planted here to help pay for its reforestation efforts.
Here’s where the experiment comes in. On a two-and-a-half-acre section, they’re partnering with the biotech company Funga to learn more about improving the soil’s quality to grow healthy trees.
Josh Parrish, Chief Growth Officer at Funga, combs his fingers through some dirt in a 5-gallon plastic bucket to explain.
“You see, there’s like little fine, white roots,” Parrish said. These are the fungal roots or “fungal hyphae.”
“The fungi break down all of the nutrients, and then the fungi pass on the nutrients to the fibrous, little tiny tree roots through the fungal hyphae,” said Parrish.
His company tested the soil here for signs of life, to see how degraded the microbiome has become after all of the industry and land disturbance. They also took multiple samples of soil from healthy forest land.
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Then Funga used machine learning and DNA sequencing to predict what kind of soil microbiome would make the trees they’re planting here healthier and more productive. It’s based on the tree species.
Under each tree planted goes a handful of healthy soil full of fungi and living organisms.
“By putting this with the tree at time of planting, you’re essentially giving the trees the best chance possible at survival and growth because you’re giving them that essentially the right partners when they’re planted,” Parrish said.
This is Funga’s first hardwood restoration trial in the U.S., since the company has mostly worked in the Southeast with longleaf and loblolly pine.
Just over a little hill is a second experimental plot, where Bosland is planting trees with another material: biochar. It’s a medium fine black powder that is a byproduct of the logging industry. It’s porous and helps trees retain water and pick up nutrients from the soil. It also gives those microbes and fungi space to colonize.
Next steps
The Lake Pleasant project with the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy is Bosland Growth’s first project toward their goal of reforesting 2,800 acres of degraded mine land in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
“It’s a gigantic opportunity to return native forest to a huge amount of land across the region,” Bosland’s Michael Knoop said.
Bosland Growth will be getting the trees established here over the next few years, managing invasive plant species replanting some of the trees that deer munch on.
Knoop says they have signed up a handful of private landowners to work with in Pennsylvania and West Virginia over the next couple of years.
