DNR: Served as the funding coordinator, project manager and primary partner for the project. DNR was also the landowner for three of the ten sites that were part of this project.

Environmental Wood Supply, LLC: Supplier to District Energy and primary private-sector partner that oversaw clearing operations and was responsible for chipping and hauling woody debris to District Energy plant

District Energy: Recipient of wood chips and consumer of biofuel that become source of energy for St. Paul

Belwin Conservancy: Landowner and manager of largest project where more than 100 acres were cleared and upwards of 4,800 tons of material removed. The non-profit Belwin Conservancy has 40 years of management experience to carry on this work and this site now joins the more than 600 acres that Belwin Conservancy has already restored and manages on their nearly 1,400-acre nature preserve in Afton, MN. This project also served as an important environmental education function for the more than 10,000 St. Paul School District students that visit the Belwin Conservancy each year.

City of Mendota Heights: Owner of a 3-acre site that served as an example of restoration in a suburban setting.

City of Burnsville: The second largest site at 26 acres and another oak savanna restoration, this project is an integral part of the City’s open space plan and served as an excellent interpretive area.

City of St. Paul: The City owns and manages a 6-acre site was the most urban site of all those in the project and served as a good example of the importance of inner-city natural area protection.

Town of Big Lake (Sherburne County): The City owns a 15-acre site and undertook this project as part of an ambitious Mississippi River corridor project in that area. This was an excellent example of conducting a woody debris removal project as part of an oak woodland restoration.

Izzak Walton League, Schuneman Preserve, White Bear Lake: The Izzak Walton League has owned this 40-acre site for many years and has been challenged with finding an economically viable means for restore it. As much as any of the pilot sites, this project helped this non-profit find a way to work with the for-profit sector to find a mutually beneficial relationship and to make possible what was once thought to be impossible.

This pilot project was an experiment and the experiment was a great success. We now know that we can restore ecologically meaningful tracts of land where that was once a pipe dream. The most arduous and expensive step in oak savanna restoration is the removal of the invasive understory and ill-suited trees. Once that was achieved at the 10 sites over 230 acres, the stage is set for the next phase of restoration.

For example, at the 170-acre Belwin Conservancy site in Afton, the next phase of planting native prairie and creating the proper environment to reintroduce fire is well underway. In just the short period of time that we have removed the offensive understory, less than one year, we have seen long extirpated species such as the Red-headed Woodpecker reappear. The species that we have planted at the Belwin Conservancy since the original work in 2008 have taken hold so that we have reestablished the continent's rarest natural community, the oak savanna, in the largest restoration project of it's type in Minnesota. We are quite confident that other savanna loving species will find their way to our preserve and we are well on the road to reinstating the grass and woodlands that were once such a fixture of the bluffs along the St. Croix River.