Support Your Metroparks During Volunteer Workday Events

March 5, 2025

By: Erin Parker, Interpretive Services Supervisor

If you love your Metroparks and other local green spaces, and want to get involved in protecting them, one great way to do that is to volunteer during scheduled workdays. These workdays allow natural resources and interpretive staff to work with volunteers to remove nonindigenous plants. Offered seasonally, each opportunity focuses on a different target species.

While some plants require specialized equipment or the use of herbicide or fire, some plants are easily removed by hand after a quick training to recognize each one, making them ideal for volunteer events.

Spring plant removal: herbaceous plants

Brought over from Europe as a food source, this strongly-scented garlic-y plant takes advantage of early spring sunlight and prolific seeding and forms thick blankets of green in the woods. Like other nonindigenous plants, deer and other wildlife mostly avoid it.

Early spring is a great time to get outside and feel some warmth and sun on your face! It is also a time that a lot of invasive plants are particularly noticeable. Because these plants aren’t adapted to our climate, they are often the first to green up and even bloom in the spring. Look at the woodlands in April and notice shrubs and understory plants that are already green. These are often nonnative and because they get out early, ahead of regionally-adapted plants, they can spread rapidly. Our native woodland wildflowers, with their short bloom periods timed to coincide with spring sunlight hitting the forest floor before the tree canopy shades them out again, tend to be slow growing and slow to spread. They can be covered over by rapidly-spreading non-natives.

Herbaceous plants are those without hard stems and that don’t typically grow particularly tall. Because they usually also only have a small root system, they are ideal for hand-pulling because they tend to pop right out of the soil, roots and all.

Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is a great example of this as it greens up early and spreads quickly. Pulling garlic mustard plants in early spring helps slow the future spread, as volunteer workdays are timed to happen before the plants flower and go to seed. And it’s satisfying work, because the plants can be hand-pulled and a small group can make a big difference to the forest floor in a short amount of time!

Year-round plant removal: woody invasives

Invasive woody shrubs, like this common buckthorn, are a large group of many species that form dense thickets in many of Michigan’s woodlands. They’re so common and widespread, that many park visitors and outdoor enthusiasts don’t realize our forest understories should be significantly more open!

Invasive shrubs, such as the buckthorn species (Rhamnus spp.), autumn and Russian olives (Elaeagnus spp.) and honeysuckles (many Lonicera spp.), while harder to remove than garlic mustard, are no less satisfying. The plants, considered woody invasives because of their thicker stems and shrubby habit, make dense walls of vegetation in the understory of Michigan’s forests. They are so common and widespread, that most casual visitors to any park or greenspace think that this is what our woodlands should look like, rather than an open understory with scattered shrubs.

Woody invasive plants are typically cut close to the ground and often dabbed with herbicide by trained and licensed staff. Some of these are also treated through prescribed fire and other methods. Invasive vines can be cut through and left dangling where they grew, preventing water and nutrients from moving from roots to leave and back again.

Tougher tasks: trees

Trees, like these tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), provide more of a technical challenge to remove and are handled by experienced and trained staff.

There are also nonnative trees that, like many of the rest of these species, have the ability to rapidly spread via seeds or underground root systems, or both. These projects are left to our trained and expert natural resources staff to manage.

One of particular concern across southeast Michigan now is tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima) not only because it spreads readily, forming thick monocultures of small trees, but it is a favored food source of the spotted lantern fly, a new-to-Michigan pest that causes agricultural harm to a variety of fruit crop plants including grapes, peaches, and plums.

This beautiful-looking insect is a spotted lanternfly, an agricultural pest that is spread from the East Coast into the Great Lakes. In its native range in Asia, it is kept under control by predators while here it isn’t recognized as a food source by our wildlife.

Volunteer opportunities

If you are interested in helping your Metroparks’ staff manage some of these species, consider joining us in one of our many scheduled workdays (see the links in the resources below for a variety of options)

Tools and training are provided at each event and plants will be disposed of properly to reduce further spread after each workday. Participants should always bring water and a snack, and dress for work outdoors, which includes potential exposure to ticks and poison ivy.

These workdays are great opportunities to make a difference, get to know your parks and park staff through a different lens, and spend some time enjoying the seasons!

Resources:

Volunteer Workdays at the Metroparks

Love Your Trails workdays at Stony Creek Metropark Nature Center

Native Plant Sale at Hudson-Mills Metropark

Sustainable Saturday plant swaps at Lake St Clair Nature Center

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