Presenter:  Michelle Villafranca
City of Fort Worth Park & Recreation

For a decade, the City of Fort Worth Park and Recreation Department partnered with the Friends of Tandy Hills Natural Area to eradicate privet, a non-Indigenous shrub, which crowds out biodiversity in one of the last remaining examples of Fort Worth Prairie habitat in the city. Staff and volunteers spent thousands of hours manually removing privet on the 200-acre site. Unfortunately, privet is very aggressive and manual removal is a slow, labor-intensive approach. In 2023, the city had a rare opportunity to tackle privet and other improvements simultaneously when it received a $150,000 grant from the Conservation and Environment Fund at North Texas Community Foundation. The grant enabled the city to expedite 43 acres of privet removal through a combination of aggressive tactics including forestry mulching, targeted herbicide and eventually prescribed burns, while meeting other long-term partnership goals to build trails, install interpretive signage and hire natural resource interns. Many challenges, lessons learned and triumphs unfurled while saving a prairie.

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