Franklin Parker Preserve: testing whether the soil recovered

Undoing a farm’s water controls

New Jersey Conservation Foundation bought the former DeMarco cranberry farm in December 2003. Its restoration account describes plugging canals, breaching dikes and breaking up compacted ground into hummocks and pools. The aim was to replace irrigation schedules with more natural water-level fluctuations. Native tree planting accompanied changes to the land itself. NJ Conservation Foundation, restoration account.

The foundation identifies the Natural Resources Conservation Service as funder through the Wetlands Reserve Program and Ducks Unlimited as an engineering partner. Its account records project completion and an environmental award, but an award alone does not measure how fully an ecosystem recovered. NJ Conservation Foundation, restoration account.

A comparison below the surface

A 2017 paper by William Eaton and colleagues compared soils from older Atlantic white cedar forest with four-year and eight-year restoration stands. Carbon-use efficiency was highest in the older forest and intermediate in the eight-year stands. Environmental DNA revealed associated differences among bacterial, fungal and invertebrate groups involved in soil processes. Eaton and colleagues, Genome (2017), doi:10.1139/gen-2015-0199.

A promising result with a boundary

The authors interpreted those patterns as evidence that restoration was improving important soil communities and as a possible basis for future monitoring. The result does not mean that young planted stands had become old-growth forest. Nor does comparing sites of different ages amount to following the same soil sample through eight years. Recovery had become a question that could be measured as well as photographed. Eaton and colleagues, Genome (2017), doi:10.1139/gen-2015-0199.