Be an Understory Steward!

Are you interested in creating meadow habitats on your land in southwest Oregon?

Two hundred years ago, the oak savannahs and woodlands of the Rogue, Applegate and Umpqua valleys looked very different. Perennial native bunchgrasses sequestered carbon while providing food and habitat for pollinators, birds and larger mammals. A rich diversity of wildflowers offered pollen, nectar, and eye-popping color from early spring until late fall. Fire was a managed tool that helped the Oregon white oaks, those castles of biodiversity, thrive.

Today, monocultures of invasive plants have overtaken most of these habitats, degrading soils, increasing the risk of harmful fire, and devastating communities of pollinators and other wildlife. But a growing movement of land stewards is helping to create pockets of habitat to bring the beauty and the quality of the native ecology back to southwest Oregon.

Now, The Understory Initiative is building a network of committed Understory Stewards to support and foster native plant communities in open meadows and woodlands. We are offering fee-based services to train Stewards in understory restoration that does not require the use of toxic herbicides. This program supports the research and education programs that are the core of our organization, and is especially important in an era of scant federal funding to support habitat restoration goals.