Highland Heights Park Habitats

Thank you to Brian Gilbert for providing the following text as a handout at our recent dusty golden meadow walk. Thank you also to Suneeti Jog for allowing the use of the material.  

A BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF NATURAL HABITATS

   The undeveloped portion of Highland Heights Community Park is almost totally surrounded by a heavily suburbanized area.  This part of the park forms a large wetland complex and contains three streams that are part of the Euclid Creek watershed.  There are four distinct types of wet lands:

1. Shrub swamp,
2. Wet forest,
3. Wet meadow and
4. Wooded swamp.

     Each of these areas has a different assortment of vegetation.  Suneeti Jog’s 2003 PhD dissertation detailed the presence of 421 different kinds of plants in the wetland portion of the park.  This portion of the park contains the only known location in Ohio of dusty goldenrod (Solidago puberula) which is now protected with a conservation easement.  That easement was achieved through the cooperation of the Friends of Euclid Creek, the Mayfield City School District and the Cuyahoga Soil and Water Conservation District.  There were about 90 shoots of dusty goldenrod growing at this site in 2002. 

   About 60% of the species were native and 40% were non-

native.  Approximately 185 of the non-native species are considered invasive.  And almost 30% of these invasive species are on a special watch list of the worst of the worst.

   Pineweed (Hypericum gentianoides) and clustered beak-rush (Rhynchospora capitellata) are two plants growing in abundance within the wet meadow site but absent from similar habitats in Cuyahoga County .

   Another unusual feature of this site is the occurrence of four different kinds club mosses (Lycopodium sp.).