Northwest Indiana Nature

Working with partners, like Friends of Marquette Park and the Student Conservation Association (SCA), we settled on planting 18 trees at Brunswick Park and 82 trees around Marquette Park. A reforestation plan helped guide tree species selection and placement based on factors such as soil type and grow space. I’m especially excited about the jack pines that are being planted at Marquette Park as it is considered a rare species in Indiana—a relic of the glaciers that once covered the area found in small, scattered stands in the adjacent Indiana Dunes. We also included some showy eastern redbuds and cucumber magnolias that will look magnificent in the spring.

Tree Benefits are Multifold

Trees are more than showpieces. They provide multiple benefits to both humans and wildlife. Referring to the plan again, we carefully selected trees to pump and infiltrate stormwater in and around parking lots and roadways, helping the city reduce stormwater that can flood neighborhoods or overwhelm sewer systems. Most of the trees, however, are being planted to help offset higher temperatures found in cities, known as the urban heat island effect. As families gather around playgrounds or people walk or bike through the parks, it will be great to have some more shade.

Meanwhile, little did we know (I’m not even sure our amazing teachers John Eddington and Art Haverstock even knew) that just a few miles away, up near the Grand Calumet River in East Chicago, Hammond and Gary, was an area with globally rare habitat and incredible biodiversity – the dune and swale complex of northern Lake County.

Prior to European development, dune and swale habitat -- or ridge and swale as preferred by geologists—encompassed an estimated 70 square miles in far northwest Indiana and a few miles across the Illinois border. While not as dramatic looking as the high dunes further east, dune and swale habitat has its own appeal: a rhythmic landscape featuring undulating ridges that gently grade down to low, wet areas, both running parallel to one another. The wetlands, some deeper than others, are greatly influenced by water levels in Lake Michigan as well as localized hydrological impacts caused by human alterations to the landscape.

Collectively, they support an incredible cast of species such as sedges and rushes, shy American bitterns, frogs that sound like crickets (cricket frogs) and endangered Blanding’s turtles. More than 700 species of plants also inhabit the area, such as spiranthes orchids and the state-threatened purple bladderwort. A carnivorous species, bladderwort flowers (there are also yellow ones in the area) stick up above inundated swales while hiding submerged stems dotted with tiny bladder-like traps that suck in unsuspecting prey like water fleas.

On the edge of the wetland areas, one might find, depending on the time of the year and weather conditions, unusual species such as yellow and pink lady-slipper orchids and fringed and bottle gentians in early fall, beckoning bumblebees to jump in and pollinate them. The sandy ridges are crowned with another rare habitat, either oak or jack pine savannas, where spaces between the trees allow sun-loving prairie plants to take hold and flourish.

Other Awesome Dune and Swale Sites in the Great Lakes

It's estimated that there are only about 17,000 acres remaining of dune and swale habitat on the planet – all located on the Great Lakes, hence its rareness and the reason we should be awed by it. Being somewhat of a fan, I’ve traveled to several other dune and swale sites, including the remote Bete Gris Wetlands Preserve owned by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and the Ridges Sanctuary in Door County, Wisconsin, owned by the Ridges Sanctuary Land Trust. There, the ridges are occupied by boreal conifer species such as black spruce and deciduous tamaracks that provide a brilliant color display this time of the year.

If you enjoy looking at maps like I do, you can also find examples of dune and swale in Michigan’s thumb area and west of Mackinaw City; Presque Isle, Pennsylvania; Point Pelee National Park in Ontario; and the Erie Sand Barrens State Nature Preserve near Sandusky, Ohio. All dune and swale sites share a common history in that they were created by irregular high and low cycles of the lakes, with each ridge having been formed at a different point in time, some as far back as 3,800 years ago and as little as 250 years ago.

Some of Indiana’s dune and swale sites were documented by botanists like H.S. Peppoon in the 1920s, and the father of ecology, Henry Chandler Cowles, was known to hop off the train near Clark Road at the Pine Junction rail stop to study the area. In the late 1970s, which is when I was in high school, many of the sites preserved today, such as Seidner Dune & Swale and Gibson Woods Nature Preserves in Hammond, were privately owned by railroads or chemical companies. Thank goodness entities like the Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Shirley Heinze Land Trust, TNC, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the passionate people who worked or work for them understood just how precious they were and strove to protect them for future generations to study.