MONACA, Pa. — Four acres of Penn State Beaver lawn is about to become a biodiverse meadow that will not only have numerous ecological benefits but will become a living learning environment for students. The process, called turf to meadow, involves killing the existing manicured lawn, preparing the soil and reseeding the area with a mixture of native grasses and flowers.
The project has moved through the planning phase over the past several months, and on Wednesday, Nov. 19, the area was seeded.
Penn State alumnus Glenn Kenny, owner of Native BEE-Ginnings, a Meadville-based native seed production company, said the project at Beaver represents a growing movement across Pennsylvania campuses to rethink managed landscapes.
“I am elated that we have seeded the meadow,” said Carey McDougall, regional chancellor of Penn State Beaver and Penn State Shenango. “This project has been a strong collaboration with the Office of Physical Plant, University architects, Penn State Extension, the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Recourse and Native BEE-Ginnings. Each expertise brought to the project has advanced its effectiveness, and we all are looking forward to the growth we expect to see this spring."
Kenny said Mark Brownlee, principal ecologist at WildLawn, an ecological design and landscaping firm in Quakertown, visited campus to confirm soil types and finalize the seed selection.
Meadow benefits
Converting a lawn to a meadow has several positive environmental impacts, according to the project collaborators.
A meadow seeded with native plants attracts more diverse native wildlife, especially pollinators, beneficial insects and birds, said Penn State Extension Horticulture Educator Glen Bupp. Meadows also help control water runoff.
“It’s really cool if you think about all of those different plant species,” Bupp said. “They look different below ground just like they do above ground, so with all those different root systems a lot of them go very deep and many of them are very fibrous. When you have water running across the landscape — and this is a landscape where water rolls across the surface — it stops that water and helps it to infiltrate into the ground better.”
While he stressed that meadows are not maintenance-free, Bupp said they don’t require the same amount of maintenance as a lawn which means less time for a person on a mower and less carbon emissions from gas mowers.
Multiple purposes
The meadow will provide more than just ecological benefits to the campus.
“With the addition of trails and educational signs, the meadow will be a great recreational and sustainability resource for students and the greater community,” McDougall said.
“This multi-use design transforms the meadow into a living resource, supporting education, research, outreach and public enjoyment for years to come,” Kenny said.
Sarah Nilson, associate professor of biology, said the meadow will “provide a living laboratory for our students to observe and document the natural world.”
Assistant Professor of Biology Autumn Sabo said she also plans to use the meadow as a teaching tool.
“I imagine my ecology students studying plant, insect and bird identification, plant-pollinator interactions, species diversity and field sampling techniques in the meadow,” she said.
“The meadow will also enhance the campus landscape and give students, faculty and staff more opportunities to engage with nature which has numerous psychological benefits including reduced stress and improved learning,” Nilson said.
Bupp said another goal of the project is to teach other institutions or organizations to convert lawn to meadow and to teach them how to maintain a meadow.
Kenny said he hopes it will inspire people to make changes and expand their views about the ecological benefits and importance of biodiversity.
“It’s one step at a time, one little portion of your capability to influence what is growing,” he said. “All the wildlife, the insects, the pollinators are so critical to the whole ecological equation.”
For Kenny, who attended Beaver campus in the early 1980s, the project is especially meaningful to him.
“Some of these plants originate from populations we’ve stewarded for years across Ohio and Pennsylvania,” he said. “To bring them back to a place where my own education started, it’s something I never dreamed would happen.”