Well, it’s all over. Yesterday (May 4, 2025) marked the conclusion of my square meter photography project. I spent an hour or so at Lincoln Creek Prairie last evening trying to capture some final images before the sun literally set on this amazing journey.
Between May 5, 2024 and May 4, 2025, I visited my little plot 131 times. If you do the math, that averages out to a little more often than once every three days across the year. That seems like a lot, doesn’t it? Of course, the average doesn’t tell the whole story. There were 14 days when I was there twice and two days when I visited three times. What can I tell you? There was a lot happening and I didn’t want to miss it.
A tiny lynx spider posing for me on my final night of the project.
On my final night, some of my last photos were of a tiny lynx spiderling. That felt very appropriate, since lynx spiders felt like near constant companions through most of this last year. I saw them hunting, guarding eggs, and ballooning through the air. I’d like to think the little spiderling I saw last night was one that hatched out from within my plot, but there’s obviously no way to know for sure.
The same spiderling from a different angle.Here’s the last photo of the plot itself as the sun was nearing the horizon.
I visited the plot throughout the winter, though not as often as I had during the 2024 growing season. As this spring came on and the prairie started to green up again, I ramped up my visits again. I was anxious to grab everything I could from the final weeks. Here are some of the photos I took during (roughly) the final month of the project.
Maximilian sunflower seed head.Yellow woodsorrel (Oxalis stricta)A clover looper moth in late MarchAnother, smaller moth – a grass miner moth of some kind, according to bugguide.netFlies were almost always present in the plot. Telling one species from another was (and is) a huge challenge.These springtails (Collembola) were only a millimeter or two long. This was one of several itsy bitsy caterpillars I’ve seen this spring.This is (unfairly) called a false milkweed bug. Naming injustices aside, it was a welcome burst of color this spring! I photographed these lead plant buds many times as they began opening.Kentucky bluegrassAnother fly. This one has red eyes. What species is it? I have no idea.A ground beetle.A four-spotted sap beetle (Librodor quadrisignatus)EarthwormThis turkey vulture flew directly overhead. I counted it.Ah, ticks. A wonderful sign of spring.As soon as Maximilian sunflower started growing, ants started harvesting extrafloral nectar from it.This little inchworm (geometer moth larva) was only about 4-5 mm long. I chased it around a long time before I finally got a few decent photos of it.Short-beaked sedge (Carex brevior) on the final night (May 4, 2025).
Even though I’m now finished with the photography part of the project, I still have a lot of work to do. I’ve been very fortunate that a number of generous experts have helped me with species identification but that process is not yet complete. Currently, I think I photographed about 330 species over the year, which is a staggering number, but that number could still go up or down a fair amount as experts continue to weigh in. Regardless, it’s a lot bigger number than the 113 species I photographed (and felt proud of) when I first tried this project in 2018.
This second edition of the project came about because the managers of Lincoln Creek Prairie (Prairie Plains Resource Institute) burned the prairie last spring. That allowed me to find what was left of my flags from the 2018 project. I decided to re-mark the same plot with fresh flags while I had the chance – just in case I decided to come look at it again sometime. That pretty quickly led to a second full-fledged version of the photography project.
I loved every minute of it.
As I work through images and have time to absorb and synthesize this whole effort a little more, I’ll probably share more images and stories in various forms. I’m working with the amazing folks at Platte Basin Timelapse Project to create some kind of short film, and who knows what else will come out of all this. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile, here are a couple short video clips from my final night at the plot. The first is the tail end of my last hike into the plot. The second is a brief reflection on the whole effort as the sun disappeared behind the trees and marked the final moments of the 12-month period. (If the videos don’t work for you, click on the title of the post to open it online and activate the links.)
Thanks for tagging along with me on this. I hope you felt even a small fraction of the joy and wonder I got out of that tiny plot of grassland. Remember, if you’re impressed by how much beauty and diversity I was able to find in a single square meter of prairie, imagine how much exists at the scale of a whole prairie, including one that may be located close to where you live. For that matter, think about what you might be able to find by just looking more closely at your backyard, a local park, or even the potted plant on your apartment balcony.
As I wrap up my square meter photography project (May 4 will be the last day of the 2024-2025 edition), I’ve been thinking about what I want to do next. The other day, I came up with an idea and I’m jumping in with both feet. I think it’ll be fun and informative, but I’m telling you about it now because that will help me stick with it. (I can’t very well back out now, can I? I just committed to it in front of thousands of people.)
I spend a lot of my time thinking up ways to create a shifting mosaic of habitats in prairies. It’s an approach that has been shown to sustain biodiversity and ecological resilience and, if you’re not familiar with it, you can read more about it here.
One of the key components of our particular shifting mosaic approaches is that individual patches of prairie often get a prolonged period of pretty intense grazing (usual a full season, give or take) and then an even longer rest period. To me, the most fascinating portion of that cycle is the first growing season following a long grazing period.
Following a full season of grazing, most of the perennial vegetation has reduced vigor because it was repeatedly cropped by cattle throughout the previous season. That opens up space for other plants who normally can’t compete well with those perennials. The result is a wild party of annuals, biennials, and other opportunistic plants until those perennials regain their full strength. It’s a fun, unpredictable, messy mix of plant species and habitat conditions.
Messiness and unpredictability can make a lot of grassland managers uncomfortable. This is true for prairie managers working for conservation organizations as well as for private landowners. I understand the discomfort, but I also feel like a lot of that comes from a distrust of the resilience of prairies. Especially in larger prairies (those bigger than, say, 80-100 acres or so), I think there’s value in putting prairies through their paces a little. Our grazing/rest cycles provide a wide variety of habitat for animals, but also help ensure all the members of the plant community get a chance to thrive and express themselves periodically.
Anyway, to draw attention to the fun, unpredictable, messiness of post-grazing prairies, I’m starting a new photography project this year. I’ll be observing and photographing portions of three prairies managed with a shifting mosaic approach that includes long periods of intense grazing and long periods of rest. In particular, I’m going to illustrate what happens during the first growing season after that grazing ends. I’ll spend most of my time within an 80×80 foot square marked out at each of those three sites.
The West Derr Prairie at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, showing three different habitat patch types from the air. Here’s my photo plot on April 30, 2025, looking northeast from the southwest corner. The plot is part of a large prairie patch that was hayed early last summer, causing cattle to focus their grazing in it for the remainder of the season.
I’m going to introduce two of the three project sites today. The third site is laid out, but I haven’t had time to photograph there yet.
The first site is within a restored prairie at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies that I planted in 2000 with 202 plant species. It’s been managed with various shifting mosaic grazing approaches since about 2009, including patch-burn grazing and others. Plant diversity has remained very steady over that time period.
Last summer, Preserve Manager Cody Miller had the center of the prairie hayed in mid-June. The cattle in the prairie then spent the majority of their time in that hayed patch, keeping it cropped short to the ground through the end of the growing season. It’s very similar to patch-burn grazing, but the focal grazing was driven by haying instead of fire.
When I set up my photo plot earlier this week, the vegetation was very short and there was a lot of dried manure scattered across the prairie. To many people, it probably looks like an ecological disaster, but I’m excited to see what happens this year. There are already some hints (see photos below) of some of the wildflowers that will thrive in the absence of strong competition from typically-dominant grasses and other plants.
Shell-leaf penstemon (Penstemon grandiflorus) will have a good year.Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) will also be abundant this season. You can also see false gromwell, aka marbleseed (Onosmodium molle) to the right of the yarrow.
The second of my three focal sites this year is my family prairie. The prairie is a combination of scattered small parcels of unplowed prairie surrounded by former cropland that was planted to grass in the early 1960’s. I’ve located my photo plot in what I’m pretty sure is an unplowed portion of the site. I’m using both old aerial photos and current vegetation composition to make that educated guess.
The yellow square shows the location of my photo plot at my family prairie. The prairie is split into four main pastures and a small exclosure around and upstream of the (usually) dry pond. Pasture #3 had cows in it for all of last growing season and was grazed hard. In mid-summer Pasture #2 was also opened to the cattle so they could spread out a little, but #3 kept getting the majority of the grazing. Pastures 1 and 4 got hardly any grazing last year and have tall, rank vegetation.
My 80×80 photo plot sits on a gentle northwest-facing slope within a pasture (#3) that was heavily grazed all last year. It’s part of an open-gate rotational system, so a gate was opened to a second pasture in the mid-summer, but cattle still focused most of their attention on pasture #3. That is evident in the very short vegetation structure and abundant bare ground in the photos I took yesterday (May 1). It is poised for a very interesting growing season.
A May 1, 2025 photo, showing very short vegetation. There has been no grazing yet this year.
As with the West Derr restoration, the plot at my family prairie has some early indications of the plants that will have a good year in this post-grazing season. It also has a stronger community of early season wildflowers than the restored prairie. I photographed some of those when I was at the site yesterday. They were easy to see because of the short habitat structure, and many were either more abundant, bloomed earlier, or both, than their peers in the ungrazed areas of the same prairie.
Short vegetation and pussytoes (Antennaria neglecta).A closer look at the pussy toes plants.An abundance of sun sedge (Carex heliophila) is one reason I’m pretty sure this is remnant prairie.Fringed puccoon was blooming happily here.A tiny annual called western rock jasmine (Androsace occidentalis) always does well in post-grazing years, both at my family prairie and at the Platte River Prairies.Another photo of the grazed photo plot. If you look closely, you can see a nice patch of ground plum, aka buffalo pea (Astragalus crassicarpus).A closer look at ground plum.An even closer look at ground plum.Some “plums” (seed pods) of ground plum that have already started to form – proof of successful pollination earlier this spring.
I’ll share photos of the third site soon. It’s part of a 1995 prairie restoration at the Platte River Prairies that’s managed a very similar open-gate rotational grazing as I use at my family prairie.
My hope is that this project will help others see what I like about the wild and crazy post-grazing period in prairies. I don’t know what will happen in these plots – that’s part of the fun! I hope you’ll enjoy tagging along with me as I watch them.
The Prairie Ecologist 