Guest post by Kim Mikus

This article appears in the summer 2024 issue of Horizons, the award-winning quarterly magazine of the Lake County Forest Preserves in northern Illinois.

From a young age, we’re often taught that planting trees is good for the environment. So, why do we see large areas of trees sometimes removed from your forest preserves, leaving the land temporarily ragged and brown?

The answer is habitat restoration, a sequence of land management activities that improve the health, ecological function and diversity of species at a particular site, according to ecologists at the Lake County Forest Preserves. Sometimes that process involves removing non-native, invasive trees and other species.

During restoration efforts, you may see dramatic visual differences.