Kingsbury Creek Forest Restoration

The Duluth Audubon is restoring and enhancing 20 acres of sensitive hillside habitat along Kingsbury Creek that belongs to the city of Duluth. The restoration includes mixed hardwoods such as oak and yellow birch and conifers that provide wildlife habitat and help improve aquatic habitat within the creek, which is a DNR designated trout stream and MPCA impaired waterway. This project will help restore ecosystem services to a landscape dominated by nonnative grasses, open canopy and stunted or declining pioneer trees. The goal is to plant a variety of species to diversify the forest as adaptive management for climate change, and return a conifer component to slow rain and snowmelt infiltration into the creek. This project is spurred in part by the attention the estuary has gotten by the EPA as an Area of Concern and by Audubon MN as one of the state's newest IBAs.