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, streambank destabilization, 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. People-powered restoration has cleared forest floor and allowed mayapples and other spring ephemeral wildflowers to blossom.
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.
