Arbor Day in Wisconsin

The Village of Sherwood has been an Arbor Day Foundation “Tree City USA” since 2000.  Sherwood annually takes part in Arbor Day activities, planting trees and helping establish tree cover and forage for birds in the park.  The Village and local schoolchildren have planted over 500 seedlings and 75 young trees, mostly in the Miller Pond stormwater area, to further enhance bird habitat and create a small tree nursery.  The village is currently completing the  landscaping the Wanick Park area with 650 trees, several hundred shrubs and grasses, and nearly 8,000 flowering plants.

Wanick Park plans

 

Over the past three years, the village has acquired two 5-acre wooded parcelsand  an additional two acres that  will be home to low impact walking trails, new tree plantings, and improved bird habitat.


High Cliff State Park features both shaded and exposed cliff habitats along the Niagara escarpment, talus slopes supporting wet-mesic forest, more than a mile of Lake Winnebago shoreline.  At the escarpment summit are vertical cliffs up to 25 feet high that contain fragile fern, bulblet fern, leaf cup, cliff stickseed, and long-beaked sedge. The undisturbed forest on the slope is composed of sugar maple, basswood, white ash, green ash, elm, hackberry, and butternut. Closer to the lake, willows and cottonwood gradually appear. A rich herbaceous layer includes wild ginger, great water-leaf, false rue anemone, squirrel-corn, toothwort, and Canada violet.

In preparation for the annual Arbor Day Tree Planting and Park Clean Up event on Saturday, April 26th, Jansport volunteers dug 500 holes.  Our local Fox Valley area chapter of Wild Ones provided a $500 grant to help fund the purchase of the trees.

A study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published recently in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that more green space were associated with lower levels of anxiety, depression, and stress. The study combined mental-health data from the Survey of the Health of Wisconsin (SHOW) and Landsat 5 satellite data from July 2009 that analyzed how much vegetation was present in each of the SHOW census blocks. They found that across all strata of society, people who lived in a neighborhood with less than 10 percent tree canopy were much more likely to report symptoms of depression, stress and anxiety.  The study appears to support the “attention restoration theory,” holding that more time in nature restores the ability to concentrate and reduces mental fatigue.