Project preserves Calumet City's link to ancient landscape

On Sunday, a group of volunteers will explore a vestige of an ancient shoreline in the south suburbs. They also plan to set it on fire.

The volunteers will be at Superior Street Prairie in Calumet City, preparing the site for a prescribed burn. They will also be gathering seeds, chopping and burning brush, and learning about an ongoing volunteer project to preserve the rare, ancient ecosystem for future generations.

“These places are kind of survivors of the last 200 years of population growth and development in Illinois,” said Jonathan Sabath, a field representative for Friends of Illinois Nature Preserves. “These little pockets that are invaluable for scientific understanding of what the ecosystems here were like before then.”

Thousands of years ago, what is now Calumet City laid al