Something is suffocating Missouri’s forest floors.
It’s leafy, it’s dense, it’s pervasive, and it can grow so thick that it walls off the understory of a forest. It’s honeysuckle.
Bush honeysuckle is not native to Missouri, yet it can be found almost anywhere in the state. It spread after being introduced for landscaping and erosion control. It competes with native plants, blocking sunlight and stealing nutrients.
The two species of bush honeysuckle that most commonly impact Missouri are Lonicera morrowii and L. maackii, although L. x bella and L. tartarica are also species of concern. Descriptive information about bush honeysuckle can be found online at the Missouri Department of Conservation's website.
And there’s a lot of it at the Heartland Overlook Preserve, a 40-acre piece of land that the Heartland Conservation Alliance, with support from the Missouri Department of Conservation, purchased a few years ago.
The preserve is adjacent to the Blue River, a 42-mile tributary of the Missouri River that dissects the Kansas City metro area. The river begins in south Johnson County, cuts across the state line, and winds up into the eastern portion of Kansas City, where it empties into the Missouri.
The HCA works to improve the condition of the Blue River. As part of that work, they collaborated with local organizations to restore the land at the preserve, which included removing honeysuckle.
These restoration efforts are necessary for maintaining the health of the Blue River, said Jessica Hartel, senior director of conservation and education at the HCA. Hartel noted that invasive plants harm biodiversity while native plants provide ecosystem services, like preventing erosion.
“You really need those riparian buffer segments or sections to have high amounts of native life and biodiversity,” Hartel said. “Because that is what will hold those ecosystems in place to perform those ecosystem services.”
Hartel said the roots of honeysuckle grow more horizontally, which limits how deep they can grow and how much sediment they can hold in place. Native plants, on the other hand, generally have deeper roots, Hartel said, which helps maintain soil health.
The honeysuckle can grow so thick it becomes difficult for animals to forage in the forests, Hartel said. Furthermore, Hartel said they have seen bird biodiversity decline in areas where honeysuckle invades because of the berries honeysuckle produces.
“…it’s not high in fat, it’s high in carbohydrates, but the birds essentially burn through those carbohydrates so fast,” Hartel said. “And I mean, it’s essentially like thinking a bird can’t make it from point A to point B because it has run out of energy. Whereas berries of our native plants are high in fat, and they are much better nutritional quality, and so they prop up bird biodiversity and abundance.”
How can honeysuckle be removed?
The preserve provides an opportunity to test different techniques for land restoration, said Hartel.
“We were interested in exploring different techniques at the site, because you ask like 10 different ecologists or conservationists or whatever what the best approach to removing honeysuckle is and you literally will get like 10 different answers,” Hartel said. “It’s not an easy feat.”
Throughout the last year, the HCA rolled out two different restoration projects at the preserve.
Project 1: Sheep
One of those projects involved the use of eco-grazers, Hartel said. Eco-grazers are herbivores that can be used for land restoration because of their eating patterns. In this case, those eco-grazers were sheep.
Good Oak, a regenerative farming and ecological restoration organization, brought 25 sheep to the preserve for grazing, said co-founder Jacob Canyon. The honeysuckle is good for the sheep to consume, Canyon said.
“It’s surprisingly high in protein, the foliage,” he said. “And they (the sheep) like it really well, they eat it readily.”
The sheep can’t eradicate the honeysuckle, but they can provide easier access to treat the honeysuckle, Hartel said.
“Once those sheep moved through there, there was nothing left,” Hartel said. However, he said the seed bank at the site poses a problem. “Honeysuckle has about a seven-to-13-year seed bank."
Canyon also noted the seed bank and said controlling honeysuckle is more than just a “one and done” event.
“In the soil right now, even where we’ve removed all the honeysuckle plants, there’s still honeysuckle seeds in that soil waiting to germinate,” Canyon said. “Even if we got rid of every plant, there would still be more honeysuckle that would come up. And the seeds for honeysuckle are dispersed by birds. So, birds eat those berries, and then they fly everywhere, and they drop the seeds everywhere. This is an eternal vigilance thing.”
The honeysuckle the sheep grazed is already coming back, but that was expected, Hartel said. Both Canyon and Hartel said timing is critical when using eco-grazers.
“If you can time the grazing with the life cycle of the particular invasive plant that you’re going after, you can systematically disadvantage it, as opposed to the native flora that you can help recover that way,” Canyon said.
Project 2: Restoration by hand
The Native Lands Restoration Collaborative tried a different restoration method at the site: their hands.
“We thought this site would be a nice space to demonstrate, to a degree, what is probably a slower method of restoration than a lot of other organizations are demonstrating,” Courtney Masterson, ecologist and executive director of Native Lands, said. “And that’s with, you know, boots on the ground, hand-cutting every stem and planting native species right behind ourselves so that we can anchor soil as quickly as possible.”
After removing the honeysuckle, Native Lands primarily focused on planting native hedges and grasses in place, Masterson said.
“They have fibrous roots that spread horizontally and deep into the ground to anchor soil, whereas things like trees and wildflowers, while they’re vitally important to wildlife and to us, they don’t anchor as much soil,” Masterson said.
Anchoring the soil is critical to preventing erosion, Masterson said, which is a concern at the site because of its steep slope.
“The invasive species for the most part, and I don’t want to paint too broad of a brush, but the ones we’re dealing with there have very shallow roots,” Masterson said.
Erosion can make it difficult for future plants to grow and lead to water quality issues in the Blue River if the soil moves down the slope, Masterson said.
After pulling all the honeysuckle out, they had to figure out what to do with the biomass that had accumulated. They originally planned to burn the honeysuckle and use it as biochar on other sites, but Masterson said getting a prescribed burning permit in Kansas City was difficult. It took a lot of back-and-forth communication, Masterson said.
“We talked about what 10-year goals on the site would look like to help further demonstrate to them the need for fire as a tool in restoration work within their city,” Masterson said. “Kansas City was once dominated by oak hickory forest, and that is a fire-adapted ecosystem that does not do well in the absence of fire for great stretches of time.
“…most of the forests in Kansas City haven’t burned in a very long time, which makes them potentially more susceptible to invasive species, which makes them … really a greater fire hazard, having all that unburned brush and who knows what in the bottom of these forests and threatens the residents of Kansas City,” Masterson added.
Eventually, they received a permit to burn on a small space on the property. They made the burn as educational as possible, Masterson said.
“There’s so much about fire ecology,” Masterson said. “…I mean, there’s nutrients related to it, it affects all sorts of plants differently and animals differently. There’s seeds that won’t germinate without fire. There’s animals that use fire to access spaces to create a habitat that they can’t reach without that fire, there’s just an immense amount of really cool, dynamic resources available to us if we’re able to use fire as a tool.”
Masterson said the site would likely need to be “defended in perpetuity.”
“The woodlands surrounding the (preserve) are full of honeysuckle,” Masterson said. “So, the likelihood of it being restored and staying restored without constant observation — and you know, once a quarter or something someone walking through and spotting honeysuckle — it’s impossible. It will have to be observed.”
While the hand restoration method is costly, both fiscally and physically, Hartel said it generally yields better results overall.
Julie Freijat is a Kansas City PBS/Flatland reporter and a Report for America corps member working with the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk. Her work is made possible, in part, through the generous support of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
This story was originally published by Flatland, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
