 Pine River back as students exchange their textbooks for work gloves today. The school is teaming up with the DNR to remove buckthorn from their school forest. Sarah Winkelman has more. They're cleaning up buckthorn. They have a lot of buckthorn here in the forest and it's an invasive species. There is a lot of work to get done in the forest, but the first step for the students was in the classroom. So they had to make posters. They had to research what buckthorn was. They had to come up with a plan for how we're doing this. They had to map. They went and taught all the elementary kids what buckthorn is and what we're doing. They're going to be presenting to the school board. Before the students started to work on the project, most of them had no idea what the invasive species was. No, um, no, I had no clue what it was. It just looks like an ordinary tree to me. Yeah, it looked like a plant at first, but now that we're getting like, now that we knew it, like now we get like, now we get what it like is. But now they are ready to not only talk about it, it's an invasive species that wherever it grows, it will dominate that area and won't let anything else go because it so densely populates the area that it grows in. But put their words into action. A buckthorn tree is easily recognizable as it's still able to produce leaves and shows off many thorns. To get rid of it, we need to go in with loppers and big tools to get rid of the bigger plants, pull all the smaller stuff and use some herbicides to get, to make it go gone. Three, two, go! Buckthorn is an issue statewide. Some places is higher amounts of it. I notice it a lot where we've got our older cities. So the older city of Brainerd, the older city of Pine River here, but we also have it out in our forest as well. Buckthorn presents a big issue, but it's an even bigger learning opportunity. This is huge. I mean, we've had this buckthorn problem for a long time and it's always fun to see the students actually doing stuff. And being able to be out in the world and helping out. About 400 students, grades 7 through 12, were out in the forest today and they will continue the work tomorrow. Reporting in Pine River, Sarah Winckelman, Lakeland News. The project was funded by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.