Ten years ago, the sycamore trees near the Everett Covered Bridge in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park were individual saplings in a grassy field. Now, they’re 30 feet tall, and the field has turned into a lush forest.
When the volunteers who planted them come back, it’s so dense that they can’t identify which ones are theirs.
“The first question they ask is, ‘How is my tree doing?’” said Josh Bates, a park ranger at Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
“You cannot buy or pay for that type of connection to have to a national park,” he said.
Since 2012, CVNP and its volunteers have planted about 33,000 trees across 230 acres. The park has lined up projects to restore another 500 acres over the next 10 years, with plans to plant around 40,000 more trees.
The tree-planting effort goes hand-in-hand with other restoration efforts across the entire park.
A ‘most disturbed’ Cuyahoga Valley National Park
The tree planting effort is necessary, park staffers say, because of how much the park has been impacted by human development, including deforestation and construction. Chris Davis, CVNP’s plant biologist, thinks the park is one of the “most disturbed” in the whole national park system when measured by percentage of landmass.
“This park is exceptionally disturbed,” he said. “People can think of that as a bad thing, but I think it’s kind of a cool thing, because it gives us a good opportunity to still continue, even today, to make things so much better.”
That disturbance goes back to how the park was formed. When the park was designated over 50 years ago, Bates said the park system acquired a “worked-in, lived-in” park as a result of human settlement, industrialization and agricultural development.
“When the NPS started to put together the landmass that became the nowadays 33,000 unchanged acres of CVNP, we had areas that [were disturbed] through people’s living and removing trees and all of that,” Bates said. “It’s really a chance for us to reclaim some areas that no longer need to be kept open as a field for farming.”
Slag heaps and other industrial processes resulted in greatly compacted soil in some areas throughout the park. That, coupled with the makeup of CVNP’s soil, which has a high clay content, means that it often has poor drainage and is compact. Davis is investigating possible reclamation projects for these areas, which would involve adding plants with root structures that can thrive in that kind of soil.
Trees are the ‘the best soaker uppers’
Part of the reason the park is so invested in planting trees isn’t because of its regional history, but because of broader national trends. Nationwide, urban areas have become less dense; at the same time, surrounding agricultural areas have been developed and contain less permeable surfaces, which water doesn’t penetrate well.
Davis called this a “recipe for disaster” when it comes to flooding.
“We have a lot of rain stations around Northeast Ohio, and … the rainfall has increased over the last 60 years at about an inch every 10 years,” he said. “More rain, fewer places for the rain to soak in — it just runs off into, in our case, the Cuyahoga River. The river rises, it floods, the creeks come into a flood — it’s just not good.”
The best way to reduce flooding is to plant trees. Davis said trees are the “best soaker-upper” of rainfall available. While places like wetlands can store rainwater, trees’ leaves slow rain before it reaches the ground, and their roots create a spongy layer that absorbs rainwater.
When open areas without trees are filled in, that not only solves the problem of water runoff, but it also brings the park closer to what it would have looked like 100 years ago, before it was disturbed by more dense populations of settlers.
“We have these little patches in this park that are remnants of human development, and they’re a disaster for local wildlife,” Davis said. “They’re kind of a magnet for invasive plants, which love a vacuum — and that’s what these holes in the forest are.”
The tree-planting volunteers of the CVNP
Thirty-three thousand trees don’t just plant themselves. The park has just a few staff that work on managing park resources, so volunteers are essential to accomplishing their restoration work, from beginning to end.
“There’s more steps to getting a tree in the ground than just having some folks show up with a shovel,” Davis said. “So we have volunteers engaged in pretty much every aspect. So that first step could be as simple as having a crew go through to remove the invasive plants to get the area prepped for that kind of work.”
The park has welcomed young and old as well as inexperienced and experienced gardeners. Their tree planting generally takes place during the spring and fall when temperatures are cooler. But that doesn’t mean the work is over during the summer. When the weather is too hot for planting trees, the team shifts to more supportive restoration work, such as removing invasive plants.
They’re also focused on other projects, including restoring creeks that were culverted, or moved underground in pipes. The park acquired the 200-acre former Brandywine Golf Course in 2023, which has 10,000 feet of buried creek that they’re planning to restore.
“At this golf course that we acquired five years ago or so through work with the Conservancy, already some beavers came in on a super messed-up ditch,” Davis said. “It’s this creek that should be beautiful — it’s just a huge ditch … Already the beavers have come in and they’re trying to create wetlands.”
For Andrew O’Leary, volunteer program manager at the Conservancy for the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, proof of the park’s success comes from being able to introduce so many people to this space that’s so vital to the region.
“We consider almost all of our projects a success,” O’Leary said. “Even if – when we look at the stats – it was a lower survival rate site, at the end of the day, we are still getting hundreds, if not thousands, of new trees that are living in the park, and we got to welcome hundreds, if not thousands, of volunteers that got to participate in those projects.”