Untrampled Snow
The story behind the work that keeps the Arb up and running
—By Brian Ankrapp
“There’s a certain peace of getting to feel the snow falling overnight and putting the first tracks down in the morning,” says Zack Gabanyicz, caretaker and resident of the Nichols Arboretum. “There’s a kind of magic to that as well. But also try not to slip and eat it down the hill.”
The Nichols Arboretum, or “Arb” to university students, is well known as a bastion of nature within walking distance of Central Campus. Its miles of trails and pathways provide a break from the often overwhelming hustle and bustle of college life. In such natural areas, it becomes easy to forget the human work that goes into maintaining its thoroughfares and keeping its woodlands healthy. Student caretakers and workers such as Gabanyicz keep the Arb running, doing everything from leading volunteer workdays to taking out the trash and shoveling snow on a cold winter’s morning. “The role of the student caretakers is really a jack of all trades and to just be a person that is always there with a continuous presence, which is really helpful to the university staff, as the botanical gardens is where their offices are, miles away.”
Running an ecosystem
Originally a student in the School of Music, Theater & Dance, Gabanyicz transferred to LSA and is now an environmental major with a future in landscape stewardship. Despite being known primarily as a natural place, the Arb has an extensive human presence, which can factor into management decisions. “It helps to have concentrated impact areas like the main valley, like those collection areas that then reduces the impact on natural areas.”
Arb workers and caretakers use many tools to manage its natural areas. That duty involves the removal of invasive species like buckthorn, privet, and honeysuckle, while also maintaining certain ecosystem functions that are necessary to the restoration of Ann Arbor’s historical environmental regime. People have played a vital role in what are now southeast Michigan’s ecosystems for thousands of years. Rather than focusing on any individual species, the natural areas are managed for ecosystem type. Says Gabanyicz, “We want to have a characteristic of hickory woodland. We want to have prairie and oak openings, and that kind of transition between the two.”
Work put into the health of the ecosystem is largely dependent on the season. Winters typically are filled with the manual removal and cutting of invasive shrubs that grow in the forest understory. Summer and fall involve planting native species in plugs and collecting seeds from dried plants to perpetuate local ecotypes. Spring is primarily a season of prescribed burns. Wildfire has a negative connotation for many, particularly after years of exceedingly large and hot fires in the western United States and Canada, but it serves a vital ecosystem function. According to the Michigan DNR, prescribed burns “help regenerate forests, control invasive species, create wildlife habitat and promote healthy forests. They also remove underbrush that, left unchecked, could provide fuels for bigger wildfires.”
On days of prescribed burns, the Arb’s urban locale provides a unique challenge. “Our geographic location is between two hospitals and elementary schools. So the area that the smoke can blow into is problematic.” Located right on the Huron at the edge of campus, prescribed burns at the Arb can only be performed when there is a favorable and consistent wind out of the west or northwest to avoid smoke blowing to the nearby University of Michigan Medical Center and the VA Ann Arbor Health Care System.
Despite the challenges of its urban location, that is also the main draw of the Arb. It provides easy access for students who might not have the means to drive far away. Ava Balfour, Michigan sophomore, says, “It is nice to walk around the paths and feel connected to nature. It feels like I’m further away from the city than I actually am.” The Arb’s location also makes it an excellent place for outreach. This can be as basic as its many educational signs or as involved as orchestrated volunteer workdays, which give people the chance to give back to the place they love or get in their necessary volunteer hours. Workdays give people a hands-on way of interacting with and learning about the natural world.
“It’s interesting the different types of people that are there,” Gabanyicz says. “There’s the students that have to volunteer for whatever extracurricular, co-curricular, curricular activity they have. There’s also the people that really just believe in it. It’s not to say that the first group I just mentioned doesn’t care. I helped lead a workday in the fall that had thirty students from John Benedict’s [professor in environmental science] class in it. And they asked so many questions and they were just so excited to learn.”
Living in a public space
The Arb is as much about people as it is about wild areas. Gabanyicz says, “An interesting thing about the Arb is it’s not all natural areas. It’s also the managed gardens. The magnolia glade has its own management goals and so [do] all the different managed collections.” These managed collections appeal to strictly human interests, and are some of the Arb’s most famous and inviting locations. In many ways, the Arb is a reflection of those who use it most. In the dead of winter, privacy can be easy to come by with only a handful of more intrepid adventures pushing through the deep snow. That illusion is shattered by a warm weekend beckoning the arrival of spring. For many students, the Arb is simply a gathering place to spend time outdoors when the weather warms up. But living in the Arb can also entail annoyances that come with one’s backyard being a public space, with giggling students out late at night while Gabanyicz is trying to finish homework or get some sleep for the early mornings that the job often entails.
In spite of this, there are many perks to living in the Arb. Gabanyicz says that being present and interacting with a space around the clock has allowed him to see subtle changes in the landscape, from the cycles of soil moisture between precipitation events to the species and locale-specific changing of the leaves into kaleidoscope fall colors. He gets to see the Arb when it is quiet and there is nobody else around. “[You are] able to see wildlife,” he says, “especially large mammals…that you don’t usually see. Seeing the deer that like to walk past the front of the cottage…a pair of foxes that are denning just uphill from the cottage. Being able to be more part of the collective of that place, I think, is really unique and I feel lucky to be able to get to do that.”
Feature Photo: A Winter’s Day in the Nichols Arboretum by Brian Ankrapp