The Dearborn Area Nature Alliance and the Friends of Dearborn Park successfully completed a big cleanup operation with the help of some unlikely allies.
According to the alliance's Facebook group, the event was the group's fifth annual Great Ivy Pull, which called on community members to come in, roll up their sleeves, and get rid of some invasive species.
Children had a play area to engage in arts and crafts, where they painted rocks to look like snakes. Participants across the board enjoyed snacks, good company, and high spirits throughout the event. Participants also planted native species like blue-eyed grass and even brought some goats along to eat up the excess vegetation.
The Dearborn Area Nature Alliance's use of goats to help deal with overgrowth is fun but not unheard of. Goats have been deployed elsewhere to keep invasive species down, produce local fertilizer without damaging the landscape, and reduce wildfire hazards. The event was clearly a big hit, thanks in no small part to these furry friends.
Dearborn Park is in Decatur, Georgia. It follows along Shoal Creek, which is host to a wide range of aquatic animal life. Both the county and city have some jurisdiction over the area, but both offered support for the cleanup. This kind of community-driven effort has loads of benefits.
Invasive plants can cause serious damage to ecosystems. They're typically brought into new environments by human transportation.
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Without the usual checks and balances those invasives evolved with, they can quickly outcompete other local species in their new environs. By choking out resources like food and space to reproduce, biodiversity suffers, along with all the services a healthy ecosystem provides, such as pollination.
"What a huge difference!" said one community member looking at the before-and-after photos of last year's Great Ivy Pull. Those photos also show bamboo growing in the area, which is notoriously hard to get rid of.
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