The Forest Park Nature Center is a staffed nature center in Peoria Heights , a suburb of Peoria, Illinois . The nature center and surrounding parkland is operated by the Peoria Park District to interpret and celebrate the elevational bluffs and oak savannahs of the Peoria Lake watershed, which in CE 1492 was one of the most fertile and productive ecosystems known to humankind.
5-495: The Forest Park Nature Center contains a small natural history museum, with an emphasis on oak-hickory synergies on a soil of sandy loess . A model chinquapin oak anchors the museum display. While loess soils are vulnerable to erosion, the root systems of the oaks, hickories, and other trees of the Forest Park ecosystem keep that section of the fragile bluffs from slumping into Lake Peoria. The natural history displays explain
10-717: Is a type of North American forest ecosystem, and an ecoregion of the Temperate broadleaf and mixed forests Biome . It has a range extending from Rhode Island and southern New York , west to Iowa , and south to Northern Georgia . Smaller, isolated oak–hickory communities can also be found as far west as North Dakota , south in Florida and in northeast Texas , and north to southern Maine and Ontario . They can also be found in Pennsylvania west to Illinois. Dominated by nut-bearing oak and hickory species of trees,
15-690: The forested woodlands of the Lake Peoria bluffland, with some of the earthen pathways jumping in and out of small, grassy tallgrass prairie openings. Forest Park Nature Center was dedicated in May 1965 as the thirteenth Illinois Nature Preserve. Along these trails many of Illinois's native species can be seen in their natural habitat. These animals include deer, raccoons, wild turkeys, and squirrels. 40°45′26″N 89°34′30″W / 40.75722°N 89.57500°W / 40.75722; -89.57500 Oak%E2%80%93hickory forest Oak–hickory forest
20-553: The oak–hickory forest has the largest range of any deciduous forest ecosystem in eastern and central North America. The current oak–hickory forest includes the former range of the oak–chestnut forest region, which encompassed the northeast portion of the current oak–hickory range. When the American chestnut population succumbed to invasive fungal blight in the early 20th century, those forests shifted to an oak and hickory dominated ecosystem. Key indicator tree and shrub species of
25-478: The roots of trees, prairie grasses, and flowers, and how the roots of individual plants work together to form a combined root system. Around the Nature Center, 500 acres (200 hectares) of dedicated parkland (including a parcel granted standing as an Illinois State Nature Preserve ) contains 7 miles (11 km) of hiking trails for field observations of the lessons learned in the center. The trails concentrate on
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