A Pathway to Rock Creek Resilience
Rock Creek Park’s nearly 1,800 acres of forest are the heart, lungs, and soul of the DC region, providing critical climate and social resilience for the more than one million people who live, work, and play in the region and storing 100,000 tons of carbon above ground. Yet the challenges of climate change – shifting plant regimes, extreme precipitation events that exacerbate flooding, erosion on the forest floor, and rapid invasion by non-native plants – threaten the future of those fragile forests.
To ensure a resilient future for Rock Creek Park’s forests, Rock Creek Park and Rock Creek Conservancy have created a landscape-scale framework to restore and maintain the forests to protect the natural resources and increase equity of access to their ecosystem services while engaging community members in people-powered restoration to sustain this restoration beyond park borders.
The forests are failing. The framework will guide our efforts to save them.
Resilience Restoration Sites
With support from the Inflation Reduction Act and local philanthropists, the Conservancy and the National Park Service are testing the framework’s strategies at three pilot sites that add up to over 100 acres of forests.
Mini-Oases: where people-powered restoration happens
Since 2019, thousands of volunteers and Weed Warriors have removed nearly one million square feet of invasive plants from 30 acres of forest spread across Rock Creek Park. The reappearance of mayapples and other spring ephemeral wildflowers offer hope for our fragile forests.
Rock Creek Conservancy’s aim is to restore Rock Creek and its parklands as a natural oasis. The “mini-oasis” restoration sites offer proofs of concept for the larger forest: removing invasive species to less than 5% cover, planting or allowing for regeneration of the understory shrubs and herbaceous plants, and ensuring visitors #RecreateResponsibly.
Rock Creek Resilience: the framework
The framework offers strategies to guide the restoration and maintenance of Rock Creek’s forests while adapting to climate change.
The goals of the framework are the following:
Increase biodiversity
Improve habitat for species of conservation concern
Increase equity of access to ecosystem services
Installation of trail and related signs (funded by Centennial Challenge and private philanthropy through Rock Creek Conservancy), which remind visitors they are in a national park, highlight park regulations, and serve to more accurately identify the official (as opposed to social) trail network
Continued education of park visitors about the Recreate Responsibly in Rock Creek principles through communications campaigns and events such as Summer in the Parks
Volunteer engagement in demonstration restoration sites (‘mini-oases’) and the Weed Warrior program
Establishment of the ‘Edge of the Woods’ club to build connections between home and Rock Creek
This will be accomplished with a few key strategies:
Reduce forest fragmentation
Plant climate-adapted species to accelerate regeneration
Help visitors recreate responsibly while enjoying the forests
The framework will be available soon - please check back!
Explore Rock Creek's Forest
The Rock Creek Forest Restoration project in iNaturalist catalogs observations of plants and wildlife in these special places. If you are walking along the trails, please add your observations.
Peek into the interior of the forest via observations logged by Conservancy staff and volunteers.
Resilience Throughout the Watershed: The Rock Creek Resilience project is focused on the 1,800 acres of forest within Rock Creek Park, and the Conservancy works throughout the Rock Creek watershed to create more Rock Creek-friendly landscapes and practices. These include additonal forest restoration, additions of native plants by thousands of Rock Creek stewards, as well as stormwater management that provide pockets of green space while reducing pollution to Rock Creek and its tributaries.
Funding for Forest Resilience
We are grateful to the past and present funders of Forest Resilience in Rock Creek Park.
This work has been made possible in part by the support of:
Individual contributors
Inflation Reduction Act
Crimsbonbridge Foundation
National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant #77557
National Park Service Challenge Cost Share program