Creek restoration project benefits extend to high school students

John Shank
Posted 4/28/17

Company commits funding to school for ecology study equipment.

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Creek restoration project benefits extend to high school students

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ROCHELLE — A large mitigation project of Deer Creek is not only going to benefit the park district and visitors to scenic Skare Park, but it also has Rochelle Township High School staff and students excited.

“This project would provide our ecology and environmental students with a great resource for studying archeology and other related fields,” said RTHS superintendent Jamie Craven, during a field trip to the park last week. “We see this as an opportunity where students could come out here for future decades to study the changes of the area’s ecosystem.”
Randy Vogel, manager of operations of Land & Water Resources, set up the field trip for the students and arranged for several members of Midwest Archaeological Research Services to demonstrate what work has to be done before construction on Deer Creek can begin.
“Our plan is to mitigate the creek and the surrounding prairie grasses back to their original state before man settled here,” Vogel explained. “But before any of that work can start we have to bring in an archaeological team to make sure we aren’t disturbing any historical Indian camp sites or burial grounds.”
Vogel and Jay Martinez, the president of MARS, explained several of the procedures that go into a mitigation project on public land.
“We dig down a foot or so in all four directions about every 50 feet looking for artifacts that could be part of a camp settlement,” Martinez explained. “If we find something significant, then we would expand our digging to see if this could be identified as a historical site and an area that would need to be designated and protected.”

As several local high school students also got their hands dirty helping sift through soil, Vogel explained a little bit about the creek mitigation project and the foliage at Skare Park.
“This project came about because of an airport expansion in the Quad Cities that will disrupt the watershed, so there is a responsibility to restore it somewhere else and mitigating and lengthening this creek within the same watershed would satisfy the requirements,” he told the students. “At one time the creek meandered through the area, but probably due to farming and other construction practices at some point it was straightened out, so we are going to put it back to its natural path.”
Vogel said the project also calls for removing a lot of invasive plant and tree species and then replacing it with foliage that would have been indigenous 12,000 years ago.
“A lot of the trees and plant life you see here were brought over from Europe and some of it has just taken over areas and had a negative impact ecologically,” Vogel said. “What we will do here is take out a lot of trees that are not good for the environment and around the creek area we will actually mow down all the invasive plants, then burn out the area, then use herbicides before we come in and replant the native grasses.”

Other benefits

Other than beautifying the area and bringing it back to a natural state, both the park district and high school district will see financial benefits from the project.
Land & Water Resources has agreed to pay the park district a minimum of $250,000 to be used for other planned improvement projects in the future at Skare Park, while the company has also committed approximately $35,000 worth of classroom and field equipment to RTHS to be used by students studying the ecology at the park.
Craven said science teacher David Oldenburg has been providing some ideas about the type of new equipment that could complement what the school already has on hand.
“This is really going to be an exciting project for the community,” added Craven, who also lives near the park and often walks its trails. “It is going to be good for the wildlife, the public and our students. I think it would really be something if we have kids in classes now who get involved with this from the start and maybe their kids and grandchildren can also say down the line that they too studied the environmental work that was done out here.”