Openlands
Bobolink Meadow Land & Water Reserve

This incredible multi-year project that Living Habitats completed for Openlands involved the re-creation of over 900 acres of contiguous grassland habitat. The beauty and regional ecological significance of this project are difficult to represent in photographs of the site because of its sheer scale, which is foreshortened across flat expanses. This recent agrarian landscape is once again teeming with life as restored native wet grassland and is home to an incredible number of native flora and fauna. This project represents a thoughtful push to bolster grassland biodiversity within the Chicagoland region in an ecologically appropriate manner, and as funded through wetland mitigation regulations by serving as a wetland bank.

The project was one of a handful of projects that addressed the mitigation requirements for the O’Hare Airport Modernization Program. To enable the modernization efforts and to meet the environmental requirements, wetland mitigation was required within the same watershed. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers partnered with Openlands to manage several projects to fulfill these mitigation requirements. Living Habitats was retained by Openlands in 2007 and served as the project’s prime consultant in charge of planning, landscape architecture, ecological design, permitting, stewardship oversight, monitoring, and project management.

Planning and design work began in 2007, and Living Habitats was actively monitoring the site starting in 2008. Site monitoring included floristic and soils sampling, drainage tile mapping, near-surface hydrologic monitoring wells and site rainfall data collection.

Following a surgical kill of invasive species, initial seeding and planting areas identified during the planning and design phase, were installed in the spring of 2010 using then cutting-edge GPS technologies on seeding tractors. Living Habitats completed site stewardship oversight and monitoring over the next ten years as part of this project. Active site stewardship is ongoing as part of the Forest Preserves of Cook County’s site management.

Following site restoration, there has been a notable and formally documented resurgence in the population of rare bird species visiting the site, both breeding and migratory, that were identified as a priority in the early design phases. Living Habitats also led a handful of site studies that considered bird species and flora relationships to their repopulating the restored grassland.

After the project’s formal vegetative establishment period, other requirements needed to be met to finalize the mitigation bank’s formal sign-off. Protecting the land from any future development is handled legally. In this case, the honorable designation of the project site as a formal Land and Water Reserve by the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission offers long term legal protections for this restored open space.

 

Location:
Richmond Township (Tinley Park), Illinois

Date:
2007 – 2021

Client:
Openlands

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Awards:
2015 National Audubon Important Bird Area, Bartel Grassland Complex, including Bobolink Meadow Land and Water Reserve

2015 Illinois Nature Preserves Commission Land and Water Reserve Designation, Bobolink Meadow