#bioswale

What’s a Bioswale?

I recently worked with a group of people to go around the UW-Oshkosh campus to revitalize bioswales. For those that have never heard of a bioswale it is very similar to a ditch but has specific plants in it that absorb water so the bioswales do not flood. We went to two different bioswales on campus, we first removed several invasive and aggressive plant species from them such as Canada thistle,…

Chelone glabra, 

White Turtlehead

not necessary a fen obligate,

I’ve seen these in mesic prairies, along seeps, ditches, wet meadows, at rivers edge, ect. They are a wetland obligate but prefer open sun overall. 

Platanthera leucophaea

due to the number of wide open fens left in the United States and the loss of connectivity between populations along riverways due to dams, diversions, developement, poor water quality, tilling, removal of rich top soil, and fire suppression this fen species has landed it’s self on the federally threatened species list with very few populations left with very few individuals in said populations. (This species is also added to the globally imperalled list due to this as well.) and much like the Northern Monks Hood and Kentucky Yellow Wood Clover, may go extinct within’ our life time. 

It is critical for the protection of these species that the land they are located on be preserved to it’s fullest and burned every few years in order to encourage protocorm developement and in-situ populations to thrive. Hopefully, as more people progress into the future of (I might be optimistic saying this) converting their pond full of fertilizer into a wet depression bioswale full of sedges that they can burn each year, and with more people going into ex-situ cryo preservation and tissue culture we might be able to get this species to regain ground, and hopefully save it from it’s theoretical direction twords extinction. 

Photographed in Clark Co. OH