For Brian Ohsowski, an assistant professor at Loyola’s School of Environmental Sustainability (SES), there are few better moments than watching a student don waders for the first time, walk into a wetland and immediately realize something was missing from their life.

“I’m focused on training our students to become good scientists,” he said. “It’s motivating and enriching to see our students understand nature through scientific discovery and curiosity.”

Ohsowski leads Team Typha, a research group that works to combat invasive plants that disrupt wetland ecosystems, with research associate Shane Lishawa. Their work has two overlapping core missions: to explore ways to limit the harm Typha, a highly invasive emergent marsh plant, does to wetlands, and to train the next generation of scientists.

Novel Approach to Combatting an Invasive Species

Ohsowski and Lishawa recently received a prestigious $1.1 million grant from the federal government’s Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI). This funding enables the group to investigate the use of an innovative method to control Typha, which would otherwise crowd out native plants and animals in impacted wetland ecosystems. Their work is being conducted in the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge, located in Central Michigan.

Ohsowski, Lishawa, and Loyola undergraduate and graduate students collect invasive Typha with a wetland harvester similar to a thresher. Lishawa’s previous work confirms harvesting effectively reduces Typha dominance in field experiments. The researchers are now addressing the collected biomass by converting it into biochar, a kind of charcoal. Biochar is known to chemically bind vital plant nutrients such as nitrates and phosphates—a quality that could be valuable for reducing the spread of Typha invasions. While Typha thrives in nutrient-rich environments, native species are adapted to growing in lower-nutrient conditions. The scientists are hypothesizing that by introducing biochar to absorb some of the nutrients that Typha hogs, the native species will be better able to compete.

“We’re trying to use invasive cattail to slow the growth of invasive cattail,” Ohsowski said. “It's experimental, but it's very promising so far.”

Kristina Tsakos, a member of the Class of 2023, won a Society of Wetland Scientists Student Research Grant to support her work with Typha. “The study of biochar is still in its infancy," she said. "We see its effects, but we don’t really know why these things happen yet. That’s what I am trying to figure out with this research.”