Brad Herrick, who has been selected as the new director of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, wants to change perceptions about the Preserve. Herrick, who will begin his new role in October, most recently served as the Research Program Manager at the UW–Madison Arboretum.
While many of us have walked the Howard Temin Lakeshore Path, wandered through Eagle Heights Woods, roasted marshmallows at Picnic Point, or encountered the Ho-Chunk effigy mounds within the Preserve, fewer people are aware of the many opportunities for research and learning.
Herrick hopes to address this by increasing accessibility and attracting more members of the campus and wider community to the 300-acre Preserve.
“I’ll be diving into finding new ways to engage students, both undergraduate students and graduate students, as well as classes,” Herrick said. “It’s such a gem of an area of campus … so I’m thinking about ways to reach out to new departments, new faculty, and new student groups that maybe haven’t felt that the Lakeshore was open to them.”
Laura Wyatt, the interim director of the Preserve who will retire in October, said the Lakeshore Nature Preserve Committee wanted a director who knew the plant communities and their needs and could help advance the reputation of the Preserve as a living, learning lab. Herrick was the perfect candidate.
“He already had soil under his fingernails,” Wyatt said of Herrick.
Herrick joins the Preserve at an exciting time, as construction on the new Lakeshore Nature Preserve Frautschi Center will begin next year. Planned to be the first “living building” in Wisconsin, the Frautschi Center will reflect the central role of sustainability to the Preserve’s mission and tie into UW–Madison’s sustainability goals.
“It’s really going to be — in terms of new building infrastructure on campus — the model for sustainability,” he said.
Wyatt hopes that with the new Frautschi Center and Herrick as the director, the Preserve’s value will become more prominent. To Wyatt, this value includes education, ecological services like carbon sequestration and lessening the impact of erosion, and the need for natural areas in urban spaces like Madison.
Herrick also wants to continue to engage Madison’s Indigenous communities, particularly the Ho-Chunk Nation.
“We want to be true to the heritage of this land and actually listen to the Ho-Chunk Nation… [so that] we truly are incorporating this knowledge into our actions to restore the land and manage it,” Herrick said.
Herrick is also interested in engaging the campus and the broader Madison community in conservation.
“The more that we can get the community, especially students who are just developing their interests, and bring them into this mix now, the better. As they go out in the world, they can remember ‘We did this thing at the Lakeshore Nature Preserve, and I understand my role in the broader restoration initiative.’”
By: Miquéla Thornton