As a natural resource manager/restoration ecologist, I tend to reflect not only on the history of the people, but also of the land and its uses by previous inhabitants. Prior to the 1830's, northeast Illinois was inhabited predominantly by Native Americans, who utilized the prairies, wetlands, savannas, and forests, which adapted to the harsh environmental conditions and landscaped sculpted by the last ice age 12,000 to 16,000 years ago, for hunting, gathering, and limited nomadic farming practices. The early European settlers were primarily trappers and hunters. As the rush of European immigrants pushed east from the 1840's through the end of the 19th century, the once vast prairie, which at one time totaled 22 million acres in Illinois alone, began to disappear. Ditching and tiling the wet prairies was a common practice to make the land more suitable for crops, while the forest and savannas were used for wood lots and areas to graze livestock.

The early 1900's saw the birth of the National Park Service system, with the preservation of large tracts of land, primarily in the west, which was still relatively un-developed. In the 1950's and 60's, many states followed the federal lead, by purchasing land for public recreation and wildlife habitat.

In the 1970's, the state of Illinois funded a project known as the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory(INAI). This project put the entire state under the microscope of biologists, who studied maps and then "ground-truthed" the areas, in an attempt to identify the last remaining remnants of the landscape left in Illinois which resembled the native community types prior to settlement. The INAI Technical Report enabled land management agencies such as forest preserve districts and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources to allocate dollars to preserve these valuable parcels and begin the restoration process. The 1980's and 90's saw the "restoration movement" expand beyond the prairie restorations to savannas, wetlands, and forests.