The Nature Conservancy’s Spunky Bottoms Restoration project

The Nature Conservancy manages the 2026 acre Merwin Preserve at Spunky Bottom along the Illinois River in Brown County and has for four years. In that time, the landscape has been transformed. Once drained and used for farmland, this land now is a thriving wetland landscape that gets richer every year in plant and animal life.

Restoration at the preserve includes the re-establishment of wetlands and open water habitats by reducing the amount of water pumped out of the area. The Conservancy planted 110 acres of upland prairie and more than 6,500 hardwood trees. The replanted species are thriving, as are other wetland plant species that have re-emerged from a seedbank that survived during the decades the preserve was farmed. Waterfowl are returning to the preserve in impressive numbers - peaks of more than 16,000 ducks and geese have been documented since restoration began.

The Conservancy is now working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to reconnect Spunky Bottoms with the Illinois River. A managed connection with the river will allow access for migratory aquatic species, including paddlefish and gar, while mitigating the degradation of the preserve's backwater areas from excessive sedimentation, unnatural water level fluctuations, and exotic and invasive species. Because river reconnection projects are so rare, the work at Spunky Bottoms provides an important conservation model for similar projects within the Upper Mississippi River System and beyond.