Though I attempt to do it regularly, its difficult to clearly and concisely express the complicated history and current pressures and implications of the ecological impacts on our landscape. Usually it takes me an hour or two of conversation with a landowner to get them to understand what, ecologically, is going on on their property, and what they can and should do about it. So I'll do my best to explain to explain in a few words here the ecological crisis going on here in the midwest right now.
You hear a lot about rainforest destruction, how an area of rainforest the size of Ohio is being lost every year. Sadly, our midwestern prairies, savannas, woodlands and wetlands have it worse off than the rainforest. Imagine that 99% of that rainforest is already gone, or even 99.99% of the rainforest is gone, all we have left is little patches of preserves the rest replaced by soybean fields, beef ranches, roadside ditches, highways, cities and so forth. Because the remaining patches are so small and so far apart there isn't enough room for entire populations of the remaining plants and animals in those areas to survive, so things are going extinct, at least locally, quite regularly. Then there is the constant pressure of new development and continued logging, as well as the many many introduced invasive species that thrive in the newly disturbed environment that continue to threaten the integrity of the remaining fragments of this once great ecosystem.
Blue Mounds State Park was all prairie and oak savanna when the first settlers arrived. Before the white man arrived Native Americans burned fires across the entire landscape almost every year. There were a few small patches of 'mixed hardwood' forest in the area, down in the lower reaches of the valley formed by Ryan Creek where they were protected by fire there were some sugar maple, basswood, cherry, walnut and others in a mixed hardwood forest along with the oaks. But where Blue Mounds State Park is today only oaks were found by the land surveyors in 1832/33. In the absence of fire, maples, basswoods and other forest trees have moved uphill into the park shading it profusely. Still, in many places the original savanna plants are managing to hold on even with reduced light levels. In other parts of the park, you can clearly see "maple dead zones" where there is not enough light for indigenous plants to survive. We're lucky so far in that there are currently very few invasive plants in the park, but it is ripe for and explosion in the garlic mustard, dames rocket and honeysuckle due to the reduced competition from shade-intollerant indigenous plants.
We have lost 99% of the tallgrass prairie, 96% of our oak-hickory woodlands and 99.99% of the oak savanna that once dominated this landscape (oak savanna is a quintessential fire-dependent ecosystem). Where we have any fragments of these left we must take the utmost care to maintain and restore these little pieces of our original, glorious, Wisconsin landscape. Cam Rock also had these plant communities, but there they have been grazed, plowed, flooded, shaded, eroded, invaded and otherwise neglected such that almost none of the original flora and fauna remain. At Blue Mounds, all of the pieces are still there, some of these pieces are very hard to find anyplace else. Walt, you're right, the state owns a lot of land, but the vast majority of it has been trashed just like Cam Rock. At the Kettle moraine too we find a few good pieces of original Wisconsin left, but most areas have been highly degraded, even replaced by pine plantation. We have to be especially careful with the little jewels we have left.
EDIT: I thought I'd add this link, this article explains the oak woodland situation very well if anyone cares:
http://www.eenews.net/public/Greenwire/2012/05/29/1
