A study on the local Giant Cane Bamboo done by two researchers at Southern Illinois University Carbondale looks into how the species interacts with itself and its environment via wildlife, soil, water, and other factors of nature and why it’s so important to the community and it’s history.
“The study that you saw is like a side project that we tried to look at the correlation between the overstory, like forest cover, and how the cane is, like, within terms of how dense it is, how dense they are, how tall and how big the patch is,” said Thanchira “M.J.” Suriyamongkol, the graduate student leading the study said.
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Suriyamongkol works along with forestry professor Jim Zaczek who’s done studies on the Cane with other professors and students in the past.
“That kind of come[s] from, like, my dissertation study that we look at,” Suriyamongkol said. “We look at the occupancy, or how, like, [the] wildlife community utilize the cane in general, of like, the remnant that we have left in the area.”
The scientific name for it is Arundinaria gigantea, also known as a river cane and giant river cane.
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The Cane Suriyamongkol looked at for research were located around the Trail of Tears and Cypress Creek area with around 30 patches of Giant Cane.
“The wildlife portion of it, we conduct a study in the summer, from April to the end of August, or like September, and we have been doing that for the past three years,” Suriyamongkol said. “This is the last year we’re doing that.”
Suriyamongkol and Zaczek would regularly monitor what species integrated with the cane, seeing birds, tree frogs and reptiles, raccoons and bobcats.
Audio logs were used to listen to animal calls and cameras to monitor how and when animals interacted with the cane patches.
“It’s in the grass family, Poaceae, so it is a grass… I would consider it a woody grass, because it forms these thickets when there’s plenty of light and exposure and disturbances and things like that,” Zaczek said.
Historical documents show large patches of the cane in the area along river bottoms and alluvial floodplains around the 19th century, Zaczek said.
With it being an important cultural resource for Indigenous history in the community, there’s a lot of interest in restoration of the plant.
“Because of the cultural importance for Native American, they used it for building, they used it for Arrow shafts. What baskets? And, you know, it was an important material, and there’s just not much of that left,” Zaczek said.
Old reports show that Native Americans were regularly using the cane, said Suriyamongkoln. As Europeans settlers came into the community they cleared the wetlands and cleared space for agriculture which could’ve had an impact on spread and growth.
Cane benefits from periodic burning to restore it similar to prairie grass, said Zaczeck. Recommended to do it sparsely every seven to ten years, it can help the can populate and knock back woods and trees.
A study done in the early 2000s by Zaczeck, Sara Baer and David Dalzatto tested the impact of fertilization and a prescribed direct fire on mixture to promote growth and spread of the cane in a four-year period.
Results from the study showed that fertilization on already established cane can decrease in culm (stem) morality and the periodic burning can increase the density and spread of the cane, showing good stimulation of growth.
Another study done by Zaczek and Baer along with other forestry professors found that the giant cane’s rhizomes established in the greenhouse or planted in the fields can be used to stimulate growth in canebrakes that could lead to wide-scale restoration.
“So over the years, we’ve had a lot of students working on different methods of propagating it, and then once we figured out a good method… of propagating it, we were looking at, how do we plant it out in the fields,” Zaczek said.
Zaczek said over the years cane has been planted in Thompson Woods as a part of past student and professor studies
“It grows with underground rhizomes…which are underground stems, essentially,” Zaczek said. “There’s a little patch of light that shines through parts of the day. So this is a better spot for it to grow.”
Though the Giant Cane isn’t as populated in the area as it was in the past, studies have shown a positive rate in growth that has in return benefited the environment around it.
“ If it opens up and you get plenty of light, and they get very dense where you can, barely even walk through it,” Zaczek said. “It’s all about how many resources they have, the heaven of light, water and nutrients they can really grow well.”
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Jamilah Lewis can be reached at [email protected]. To stay up to date with all your southern Illinois news, follow the Daily Egyptian on Facebook and Twitter.
James Zaczek
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Were saying, I’m just saying that, according to the literature, there’s only about 2% of cane breaks, which is a big patch of cane,
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Arundanaria, Gigantea, And it’s in the grass family poacee, so it is a grass. And it’s, I would consider it a woody grass, because it is, it’s, you know, it, that’s, it forms these thickets when there’s plenty of light and exposure and disturbances and things like that. From historical records, there were extensive cane breaks out there. Like I said, the estimates that there may be only 2% of it left, kind of like prairie would be, if you’re familiar with prairies, you Yeah, there’s grasses scattered around in various prairie plants, but they’re not all kind of in a in a larger ecosystem, in one large patch, there’s a prairie patch out in front of life Science too, a little if you’ve ever seen that, but it’s just a little tiny patch. It’s not a functionally operational kind of ecosystem that. And so there are places in Illinois and other Midwestern areas that prairie is being restored, but it’s, I don’t know what the figures are for Prairie, very small portions of prairie remaining, so it’s kind of the same thing. So I’ll turn it over you for a little bit.
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Well, when, when the area was settled in the 1800s their their historical documents show that they identified large patches, especially along in the river bottoms and in areas that are alluvial floodplains that tended to be where it was found.
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Important cultural resource for Native Americans, there’s a lot of interest in restoring giant cane, or sometimes called river cane, depending on where you are as a you know, because of the cultural importance for Native American, they used it for building they used it for Arrow shafts. What baskets? And, you know, it was a an important material, and there’s just not much of that left.
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Yeah, it’s, you know, mid to late, 1800s up until, you know, relatively recently. But yeah, that’s as the land was settled. Cane grew in some of the most productive soils, which would be excellent for growing crops, and it was not difficult to basically remove because it’s not like large trees that you know you could, you could Basically burn it down repeatedly. Cane actually is benefited by periodic burning. It’s kind of like prairies. You burn prairies to restore them. Well, cane is kind of a similar thing where it’s it doesn’t take to frequent burning, but maybe every seven to 10 years, it helps the cane populate or Yeah, and it removes some of woody competition the trees and knocks back some of the,
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He’s done quite a bit of research on and his grad students. By the way there’s many grad students that have come through here in the past 20-25 years that have worked on giant Cane and
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it’s, it’s not the plant itself or ecosystem very it’s a, it’s a priority ecosystem to restore, be restored by various agencies and groups.
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the plant itself, you find in places here and there. We have a little patch in Thompson woods that we planted,and there are patches along roadsides, along streams, but they’re small. They’re not a functional cane break. And it’s kind of like saying, Here’s a tough of grass. That’s a prairie, you know. It’s not. It’s, you know, so in order to have a the I would say the ecosystem. I don’t like to use the word endangered necessarily just what’s the appropriate word. I like conservation
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yeah, immunity of cane in this that is more concern
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we’re planting it. We back when Dr Schoonover was a graduate student. He He did some work, as you mentioned, looking at Cane along streams as a right, what they call riparian buffer, which is riparian area, is kind of the transition zone between land and water. So right along the edge of streams, it’s known that forest can be really good to basically absorb nutrients that run off agricultural fields, and so he had used giant cane. He found a cane break on one of our cooperators lands, and he looked at Cane compared to forest. And giant cane actually absorbed lots of nutrients, weight, you know, more than forest, and in some respects. And so it’s, it’s a we started off with that, and then he, I was on his committee at the time, and had an undergraduate student who was interested in doing some research, and got a little small internal grant from SIU, and looked at, how do you propagate this? Because very little has been known about how to grow it.and when it, when it does produce flowers, which might be some random event every 25 or 30 or 40 years, it can’t be predicted. Most of the seed is not good, because there’s these isolated patches are maybe clones. They might all be originally from one plant that spreads out and so the pollen from other patches, because they’re so rare now, doesn’t allow it to make good seed, because you need out crossing it doesn’t self pollinate, you know? So anyway, we were looking at ways to vegetatively propagate it. So over the years, we’ve had a lot of students working on different methods of propagating it, and then once we figured out a good way of method and good method of propagating it. We were looking at, how do we plant it out in fields? So we’ve done a lot of planting studies, you know, restoration studies, and we’ve looked at,
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Yeah, we’ve had good luck with survival and some of this, we haven’t monitored past three or four years officially with actual measurements, but they’re out there. They’re growing. The trees overtake them over time, and they really need to be managed. But they’re on. They’re not on our property. They’re on, you know, like Nature Conservancy property, or Illinois Department of Natural Resource or Cypress Creek National Wildlife Refuge property. And you know, they, if they manage it, that’s a kind of up to them, but we help them get started. We started a nursery here on campus so we could have our own patch to dig from, and so we have a patch that’s half acre.
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It’s out on the SIU farms.
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yeah, that’s we it might be the only dedicated patch, or maybe some other ones now, because other people have kind of taken up some of this information and gone with it, but we started that, what, 15 or more years ago, and it’s a pretty thick patch now, and that’s one of the places you’ve studied, right? Oh, you didn’t do that patch.
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okay, cool. No, there is a patch. I don’t know if it’s still there, right on by the green houses over by life science,there’s a little patch there used to be a little bit bigger. I don’t know if they’ve gotten rid of it, but that that is the non native material. And that tends to get bigger in diameter and taller. And, like, a non lot of, like, a lot of non native species, they tend to thrive a little bit more because, yeah, nothing has evolved to eat it.
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Maybe I don’t have anything here. There’s a small patch in Thompson woods. You’re gonna you’d have to wade through some brush to get at it, and without long pants. It’s both of us. Well, it might be, yeah, I mean, it’s not really tall stuff, and it’s not too far, but it’s kind of up to you,
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a five minute walk here, between here in the library. Okay, there’s a little path that cuts down through the woods from, you know, and it, it’s just off the path a little ways we is it, like,
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I could walk you out. It’s the trees are all overhead, so it has reduced its vigor. I think one of our undergraduate students, or graduate students who who taught tree ID, he planted it. We grew a bunch of it. He planted some so our tree ID students would have some material to look at to be able to identify it.
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This is, it’s all here, and you can see it, it has, it grows with underground rhizomes, which are, which are underground stems, essentially. And it’s running along that way. And you can kind of see how in a line it’s going that way. And, yeah, so it’s, there’s a little, what they call a sun fleck here. Yeah, there’s a little patch of light that shines through parts of the day. So this is a better spot for it to grow.
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think they were planted back at least 10 years ago.probably planted as little individual plants.
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But you know, it is kind of running along. Here’s one. There it is spreading out. You know, people call it invasive, but that is the wrong term. By definition, invasive is a non native plant, yeah, that spreading and stuff, yeah, it is, I call it. It can be somewhat aggressive. There grows into areas people don’t necessarily. I wouldn’t recommend it to plant at your backyard. I have, but because it does, you know, it can spread and it can go in your neighbor’s yard or and so it’s, it’s very we need more of it
MJ
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So the study that you saw is like a side project that we tried to look at the correlation between the overstory, like forest cover, and how, like, the cane is, like, with in terms of, like, how dense it, how dense they are, how tall and how, how big the patch is. But that kind of come from, like, my dissertation study that we look at, we look at the occupancy, or how, like, wildlife community utilize the cane in general, of like, the remnant pageant that we have left in the area,
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The some like old reports and stuff show that, like, the Native Americans have been using them, right? That’d be there, like before then, and then the European citizen come in, and then there’s more report on it.
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they 19, something after the European settler come in and, like, drain the wetlands and clear all the land for agriculture and, like, ranching and stuff, right? I don’t know the exact years.
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Dr.Schoonover
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Dr Schoonover and did some study on, like, the impact of cane on runoff, right? Agriculture,
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for the wildlife portion of it, we conduct a study in the summer, from April to the end of August, or like September, and we have been doing that for the past three years. and this is the last year we’re doing that, but yeah, we would go out regularly to monitor what species using it. So we for like reptiles and amphibian, we actively search for them and look for them. And for birds, we put out audio lockers to listen to the calls. And for mammals, we have game cameras out to monitor who come through the cane patch.
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. A lot of raccoons? We see a lot of green tree frogs, very like common in the cane. Okay. Raccoon apart. Some. We’ve seen some bobcats in the cane.
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I did all the natural Lee, ochre patch. Oh, yeah, that’s right, yeah, all over, like, Trail of Tears, okay, okay, Cypress Creek area.
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I did. I did 47 for the cane study, but for the wildlife monitor, I did 30-ish patch.
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