Walk at Elklick Woodlands Natural Area Preserve
Date/Time
Sunday, May 1, 2022
10:00 am - 12:00 pm
Location
Elklick Woodlands Natural Area Preserve
Categories
Join Botany Chair Nelson DeBarros for an informative walk at Elklick Woodlands Natural Area Preserve. The Preserve is normally closed to the public.
Nelson will lead a walk at 10am and again at 1pm.
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Elklick Woodlands is a 226-acre Virginia Natural Area Preserve owned by the Fairfax County Park Authority. It is in western Fairfax County within a larger natural area known as Sully Woodlands.
Elklick is one of the best remaining examples of a natural community known as a northern hardpan basic oak-hickory forest. It’s a globally rare community. This type of forest is characterized by white oak, pignut hickory, white ash, and redbud. It occurs on soils that are commonly called “shrink-swell” soils, which means they are derived from diabase (a dark, fine-textured igneous rock) and characterized by dense, plastic, clay soil texture. Water ponds on it during wet periods, however soil moisture is exceedingly low during droughts. This fluctuation in soil moisture leads to stunted, open-canopy trees, which encourages a wide variety of grasses and herbs to grow in the sunlit understory. This kind of forest naturally exists in just a few counties in the Northern Virginia and Maryland Piedmont. Most examples of this forest type have disappeared because of urban and suburban growth.
Nelson DeBarros is a Vegetation Ecologist with the Fairfax County Park Authority. Nelson earned his B.S. in Biology from Providence College in Rhode Island, and a M.S. in Ecology from the Pennsylvania State University.
Before relocating to the Mid-Atlantic, Nelson served as the program botanist for the Connecticut Natural Diversity Database.