Mortenson team members from the Twelvemile Solar project in Bryan and Johnston counties teamed up with the Durant Sustainability Coalition to remove invasive species and clean up the stream running along the north side of Schuler Park in Durant on April 17.
DSC is dedicated to making Durant the cleanest, greenest and friendliest town in Oklahoma, according to board chair Jeremy Spence.
Restoration ecologist Kelley Carr organized and provided guidance for the cleanup, which DSC hopes will be the first of many to make local streams and watersheds cleaner, more resilient, beautiful and inviting as natural habitat.
In addition to removing invasive species, volunteers cleared debris and picked up trash from the stream.
“This is a big project and much needed,” Spence said, in a news release. “We believe this initial work will make a big difference and inspire others in the community to help expand the effort to restore our waterways.”
Carr said the cleanup entailed removing invasive species that were brought from other parts of the world either on purpose or by accident.
“What those invasive species do is invade natural habitats and outcompete the native species for resources like sunlight and water and nutrients,” Carr said. “When that happens and they take over a spot, the wildlife that depend on those native plants no longer have their food source and the proper habitat structure they need, so it just causes a domino effect of impacting the wildlife and then they can’t support the plant life and all of it goes downhill and all of those environmental and ecological services that we get from the plants and animals are lost and we see increased erosion and lower water quality, less pollination of our crops and flowers and stuff like that.”
He said the species the volunteers were focused on were white mulberry and Chinese privet.
“That’s probably the biggest two in there, but there’s a few others,” Carr said.
Emily Woepking, a field engineer at Mortenson, described it as a stream restoration project that also involved cutting down overgrowth.
“Hopefully, this area can be cleaned up so that maybe someday it can used as a community garden there were talks of,” Woepking said. “It’s really just one of Mortenson’s ideals to keep in mind about volunteering. So, like every project, so right now, we have a solar project going in Milburn and every project, we have values to go out and volunteer or support our community in different ways. The different communities that we travel to because we all travel to different projects, and this is one way that we can do that this month.
“We’ve also done some other projects in the past, but this is one that I’m really excited about because sustainability is a big passion of mine, so I got the chance to organize this one in partnership with the coalition of course. I’m just really excited about it because I feel passionate about doing stuff for the environment and just making sure that we’re being good stewards of the earth that we’ve been given.”
