Honeysuckle Reflection

Walking through Ruder Preserve, anyone could see how much honeysuckle had already been removed, but also how much there was still to remove. We went and helped remove honeysuckle from Ruder Preserve because it is an invasive species, but also because removing it helps other plants be able to thrive. We could see from where honeysuckle had already been removed that plants were growing and taking back over the land, an example being sycamores. By removing honeysuckle, we are helping remove an invasive species and making environments for plants to come back. I’ve never done a service project like this, I knew that people did environment service projects but not like this. This definitely changed my view of a community service project because we could see the impact that we were making as we did it. Even though there wasn’t that many of us and we only worked for a couple of hours, we cleared out a lot of honeysuckle that will help Ruder Preserve.

This experience did change my view of invasive species. I knew that honeysuckle was bad and since I live near Oxford, I’ve always known how invasive it is. However, after seeing how much better Ruder Preserve looked after it was gone made me realize what a negative impact invasive species could have. Also seeing how if it wasn’t painted with herbicide after to kill the honeysuckle, it could make it even more invasive. The honeysuckle that hadn’t been painted over made it harder to remove because there were so many more branches.

I thought that this was a great class experience for BIO 155. It showed all of us just how invasive species impact the environment that they are in and how damaging they can be. It was also a really good experience because it was something different than what we normally do in class. We got to see in person what we had actually learned about. A suggestion that I have that might improve this service learning project would be to maybe learn about invasive species with the other classes than do the service project together. It would be a fun experience to meet kids in the other class and remove honeysuckle with them.