by Mark Moran
Rock Creek Park is an oasis in the city, in more ways than one.
“One of my greatest pleasures is to go alone into the peaceful setting at Reservation 630 West in Rock Creek Park, planning for volunteers who will help with the removal of invasive plants that will allow native plants to flourish,” said Kathy Sykes. “As I step into this shaded forest, the temperature drops, and I happily escape the Washington summer heat. I feel I have taken a mini vacation from the noisy city and my mind focuses on the beauty all around.”
Sykes, master naturalist and gardener well known in the Forest Hills neighborhood for tending several lush sidewalk gardens along Connecticut Avenue, is also a “weed warrior” for Rock Creek Conservancy, leading teams of volunteers in the maintenance of one the conservancy’s six “mini oases” at Reservation 630 West near the intersection of Reno Road and Tilden Street, NW.
Rock Creek Conservancy is the watershed organization dedicated to protecting what is arguably the city’s most important natural asset – the 33-mile Rock Creek and its surrounding 1,800-acre national parkland. The conservancy is also a philanthropic and stewardship partner to Rock Creek Park, allowing the organization to raise money on behalf of the park.
According to Jeanne Braha, executive director of the conservancy, in the past year some 4,000 volunteers helped remove more than 174,000 square feet of invasive plants and nearly 18,000 pounds of litter from Rock Creek and the parkland. This year the conservancy announced a forest resiliency plan for the long-term maintenance and restoration of the forests within the park. In July, Rock Creek Conservancy was awarded the National Park Service’s George and Helen Hartzog Award for the National Capital Area, which recognizes the exemplary work of volunteers and volunteer agencies in preserving the nation’s parks. The award specifically honors the conservancy’s innovative use of volunteers during the pandemic and its work in creating the six “mini oases” where the organization focuses its restoration efforts.
“We know that restoration efforts work better when they are concentrated in one place and sustained over time—not a little bit here and there but a lot in a concentrated area,” Braha said in an interview with Forest Hills Connection. “Four years we ago established the six oases as demonstration restoration sites where we work regularly, at least once a month, engaging volunteers to remove invasive plants and our weed warriors who are trained to do work on their own.”
The six oases are Reservation 630 West; Normanstone, near the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge; Trail 9, near the intersection of Beach Drive and Broad Branch Road; Piney Branch Ingleside in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood; Carter Barron, near the grounds of the Carter Barron amphitheater and within the Brightwood Recreation Center; and Fort Slocum Park in the Brightwood neighborhood.
Rock Creek Conservancy’s work in the oases has achieved something remarkable, reaching the national park’s natural resource management goal of having less than five percent of the oasis surface area covered by invasive plants.
“Often we are starting from 60 to 80 percent cover, so this is a significant achievement,” Braha said. “But removing invasives is not a one-and-done activity, you have to keep at it.”
The conservancy also hosts the Rock Creek Conservation Corps, a team of 20 high school students (ten from DC and ten from Montgomery County), who serve a six-week term in the summer as volunteers removing trash and invasive plants.
“We want to empower these young people to claim ownership of the park and to be ambassadors for the park,” Braha said.
Any casual visitor to the park during the peak months of the pandemic could tell that it had become a respite from isolation for countless area residents when everything was closed and, as Braha said, the park was “the only show in town.” The conservancy was creative in developing “socially distanced stewardship” during those months allowing volunteers to continue their work and offering a venue for safe social engagement.
Braha and Sykes both underscore that the park serves as the “heart and lungs” of the city, and its preservation is a vital way that volunteers can do something tangible in the face of climate change.
“A lot of the youth who work with us have existential dread about climate change,” Braha said. “They say they need to do something, anything.”
And in Rock Creek Park, they can do some good.
“If you look at a heat map of the city, Rock Creek is this deep blue cool area,” Braha said. “You can feel the temperature drop as you get closer to the park. In many ways, the park is helping us to combat the urban heat island effect. The forest serves as an important carbon sink, storing about 100,000 tons of carbon above ground.”
Said Sykes, “I have had an enjoyable time with children, high school students, working professionals and retirees saving trees from English ivy, removing the host plant for the invasive spotted lantern fly, pulling porcelain berry and digging up multi-floral rose.”
“We need a community to care for Rock Creek Park. With climate change and the growing problem of species extinction, volunteering in a stewardship activity benefits our forest and the natural environment. This is a small contribution everyone can make.”
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