When I think back on my career so far, it’s hard to come up with anything that’s been more gratifying than my work in prairie restoration.  After all, what could feel more conservation-super-hero-like than taking a low-productivity row crop field and converting it to high-diversity prairie?  Today, I can walk through hundreds of acres of restored prairies for which I harvested the seeds, planted the seeds, and have managed/overseen management over the last 20 years or more. 

Yowza.  That’s a great feeling!

That’s why it’s awfully frustrating to hear people say something like, “well, but it’s not REALLY restored, is it?”

What are you even talking about? 

“Well, the amount of soil organic matter in your previously farmed site is a lot lower than in that unplowed prairie over there…  It’ll take another 100 years or more before your site matches that real prairie.”

“Look, it’s pretty and everything, and I guess you’ve got most of the right plant species, but the relative abundance of the species is completely different in that real prairie over there.”

“Where are the bison, prairie, dogs, elk, and wolves?  If it was really restored, you’d have all those functional components of prairie.  You’ll just never be able to really restore the prairie – it’s gone forever.”

Ok, look.  Let’s talk about expectations, objectives, and the apparent lack of joy and wonder in some people’s lives.

Why do we do prairie restoration?  There’s no single answer to that question, but having an answer is key to deciding whether you’ve been successful or not.  (You might have noticed that I’ve been using a lot of italics in this post.  Italics help with emphasis and ensure you’re reading the text in the same way I’m thinking as I write it.  I’ll try to refrain, though, because eventually it’ll become irritating.)

Anyway, it’s important to know why you’re restoring a site.  Are you trying to create bird habitat?  Something pretty look at through your dining room window?  A place where you can see lots of bees and butterflies?  All those are very achievable objectives, and no one can say you’ve failed if you see birds, beauty, butterflies, and/or bees.  Actually, knowing some people, they might still say it, but you can ignore them because you know you were successful.

From a conservation standpoint, I think the most powerful objective for prairie restoration is to help stitch a fragmented landscape back together.  For example, the stated objective for the prairie restoration work at our Platte River Prairies in Nebraska has been to enlarge and reconnect prairie fragments in a landscape dominated by row crops.  We started with small, isolated patches of prairie that were separated by crop land.  We wanted to make those little fragments function as larger, more connected units increase the viability of the populations of prairie plants and animals and strengthen the ecological resilience of the whole community.  That felt important, but also testable.

To build restored prairies and meet that objective, we harvested seeds from as many prairie plants as we could – harvesting from the prairie fragments we were hoping to improve, but also from similar sites within a few counties from the project area.  Those seeds were planted in crop fields adjacent and/or in-between prairie fragments.  We used seed mixes of 160-215 species of plants for most of the projects I supervised (including seeds for some wetland habitat we embedded within many of those sites).  As those restoration projects became established, it sure looked like we’d created some nice connective tissue between those fragmented prairies. 

Over the years, we’ve tried to evaluate our success in multiple ways.  I’ve done a lot of data collection to ensure that the plant species we harvested seed from became established and have stuck around in the restored sites.  They did, and they have.  The sites have experienced lots of fire, grazing, and drought and have maintained their plant diversity.  That feels like a good indication of ecological resilience. 

The planted prairies, though, are really just the means to an end, and that end is the viability and resilience of the formerly isolated prairie fragments.  Because of that, the most important measures are those that evaluate whether those prairie fragments are better off now than before.  Testing is ongoing, and will be for a while, but the news so far as been very good.

Through some basic species inventory work, we’ve shown that most of the ant, bee, mouse, bird, and grasshopper species in the prairie remnants (unplowed prairies) can also be found in the restored habitats.  That’s a crucial first step.  We hope to keep digging to see how those species are using the restored habitat.  Is it meeting their requirements for nesting, foraging, sheltering, etc.?  Those are more difficult evaluations, but important.

The restored habitat often looks different than that of the remnants.  That doesn’t bother me.  In fact, there are advantages to it.  For example, Emma Greenlee, a 2022 Hubbard Fellow, showed that our restored prairies often complement the pollinator resources (flowering plants) available in adjacent remnant prairies.  Emma showed that when flower numbers dipped for a while in remnant prairie, the adjacent restored prairie habitat usually compensated by having a big pulse of available flowers at the same time.  The reverse was also true.  In other words, because we’ve added restored prairie to the neighborhood, bees and other pollinators have a much more stable supply of food throughout the season.

We’ve also enjoyed the benefits of larger prairie expanses when it comes to prairie stewardship.  It’s a lot easier to manage for the habitat needs of all our target prairie species when we’ve got more space to work with.  Because every animal has its own requirements for vegetation structure (height, density, patchiness, etc.), we try to provide all the possible habitat types we can in every prairie.  Creating a shifting mosaic of habitats is really tough in small prairies because there’s not room to make them all – especially because many animals (notably birds, but also others) need habitat patches to meet certain size requirements.  In larger prairies, we can provide the full range of habitat patch types, and at what we think are appropriate scales.

Larger prairies also reduce the exposure to habitat edges where lots of bad things can happen.  The boundaries of prairie habitat, for example, are often places where invasive plants try to enter.  As a result, the border zones of prairies require a lot of extra work to scout for and suppress trees, shrubs, or herbaceous plants trying to infiltrate the site.  In a small prairie, the entire site can basically count as a ‘border zone’.  If you make that prairie bigger by restoring adjacent habitats, you can create some interior ‘core areas’ where invasion pressure is reduced.

I could continue, but the point is that we’re seeing strong evidence that we’ve achieved our restoration objective.  The small, isolated prairies we started with seem to be functioning as larger, more connected units and are reaping the conservation benefits of our restoration work.  That sure smells like success to me!

Sure, the soils beneath a site that was in row crops for 60-100 years still look different than those beneath adjacent unplowed prairies.  Plant communities planted 20 years ago aren’t going to look exactly like those in prairies that have been around for thousands of years and were shaped by various iterations of human stewardship during that whole period.  And, no, we don’t have bison, elk, prairie dogs, or wolves (though we are seeing more prairie chickens).  Guess what?  None of those variables are particularly relevant to our objectives.

We wanted to use prairie restoration to improve the resilience and long-term survival chances of our small prairies and their inhabitants.  I think we’ve done that, though we’ll keep trying to evaluate our success.  The fact that restored habitats have soil organic matter levels that are different from remnants, or that some plant species are more or less abundant, doesn’t mean that we’ve failed. After all, we’re not trying to replicate our prairie fragments; we’re trying to save them! 

Habitat loss and fragmentation are the biggest threats to prairies in many places.  It’s extraordinarily difficult to sustain populations of species in tiny, isolated prairie patches.  Countless events, including fire, grazing, haying, or herbicide treatments by prairie managers could wipe out a species of leafhopper, snake, or toadflax in a small site.  It’s hard to see how those species might recolonize when the nearest prairie is miles away, across expanses of crop fields and/or urban development.  As a result, successful stewardship of small grasslands is extraordinarily challenging.

I don’t know how we can possibly save those prairies without making them bigger and more interconnected.  The only way to do that is via prairie restoration in surrounding areas.  Many restoration projects, including ours, have shown that restored habitats can enlarge, connect, complement, and otherwise improve the viability of small prairie fragments.  That’s great news! 

So, why should we let people tell us why our restored prairies don’t look right, don’t have the right soils, or are otherwise not measuring up to what they think a restored prairie should be?  Prairie restoration is incredibly important and gratifying.  Let’s celebrate our successes and keep looking for more ways to make bigger and better prairie landscapes!

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Additional information you might find interesting:

A short philosophical post that puts prairie restoration into a helpful context (according to me).

A post and interview about wrestling with the complexities around seed sourcing for climate-change adapted restoration projects.

The Bureau of Land Management’s Seeds of Success Program aimed at “increasing the quality and quantity of native plant materials available for restoring and supporting resilient ecosystems.”  The program includes a strong set of protocols, many of which are relevant to site-based restoration programs.

You probably aren’t surprised to see yet another post about my square meter photography project. It’s been nearly a month since my last post on the project, which covered some of what I saw at the plot during the first two weeks of July. Since then, I missed a week because of our Colorado vacation but have otherwise tried to keep up with everything happening in my favorite little grassland spot.

I may or may not have have even visited the plot before unpacking the car after our Colorado trip. I’m not obsessed – who are you calling obsessed?

Butterfly milkweed and lead plant are both done blooming for the year and are working on producing fruits/seeds. Maximilian sunflower is getting close to blooming, as is the pitcher sage (Salvia azurea) plant that has a couple stems leaning into the plot. (Yes, I count anything that leans into the plot. I also count anything rooted inside the plot that leans outside the plot. My project, my rules.) When those sunflower and pitcher sage flowers open up, I anticipate a big rush of pollinators and other flower-feeding insects. In the meantime, there’s still been plenty of action going on, despite the absence of big showy flowers.

Quick Aside:

In 2018, this time of year was marked by (one plant of) stiff sunflower (Helianthus pauciflorus) blooming, though the story quickly became about the little leaf beetles that quickly consumed most of the blossoms. This spring, I was surprised and disappointed that I didn’t see any stiff sunflower plants in the plot. The species is still doing well elsewhere in the prairie, including just across the trail. In and around my plot, though, it’s mostly gone.

As a perennial plant, stiff sunflower is an odd duck. Like many perennials, it makes rhizomes (underground stems), which allows it to move laterally through the ground. Buds on those rhizomes can produce an aboveground shoot several feet from where the last shoot was. Unlike most rhizomatous perennials, though, the ‘parent’ shoot from which the rhizome originated doesn’t survive the winter and the rhizome disintegrates, leaving the new shoot on its own.

Because of this weird strategy, stiff sunflower is sometimes called a ‘pseudo-annual’ because each individual shoot only survives for a single year, even while the overall clone (the individual genetically identical patch) can survive for many years by making new shoots each year. Often, stiff sunflower does this trick and just pops up in different places each year within the same area – where it’s happy with soil and sun conditions. In the case of my square meter plot, it either died out or (I hope) migrated away to a new location. In six years, the plant could have moved quite a distance. I miss it in my plot, but it’s also fun to look at nearby clones and wonder if they’re ‘my’ stiff sunflower.

Ok, back to the story:

So anyway, there are four plant species in bloom right now, three of which are grasses. Switchgrass and big bluestem are the most prominent of the grasses, along with a single small annual I think is witchgrass (Panicum capillare) but I’m not 100% sure yet. It’s really short for witchgrass (five inches tall), but still managed to bloom in the dense shade within the plot. In addition, there are several eastern black nightshade plants (Solanum ptychanthum) in flower. I haven’t managed a good photo of the witchgrass yet (it’s hiding in the shade), but have nice shots of the others.

I’ve not seen any insects visiting the nightshade, switchgrass, or witchgrass flowers, but the big bluestem has attracted lots of little hover flies. Most of them are the very common ‘margined calligrapher’ hover fly (Toxomerus marginatus), which seems to enjoy the pollen of big bluestem very much. There are lots of other flies around, though, including hover flies feeding on grass pollen as well as other species of fly doing other things.

Flies are definitely the most abundant group of insects I’m seeing right now. Most of them are species I’ve already photographed, or at least I think that’s the case. To be safe, I still photograph quite a few of them – especially the really little ones – because I’ve learned that I’m not very good at fly identification.

There are way too many fly species that look similar for me to have much confidence. I’m hoping I’ll find someone who can later help me identify them, or at least help me decide how many different species I might have. If you’re good at fly identification and suffering from boredom, let me know! I could use the same kind of help with leafhoppers (good grief – leafhoppers…)

One of the more common groups of flies I’ve been watching are the longlegged flies (Dolichopodidae). Many of them are an iridescent green color and they’re tiny predators. I’m guessing/hoping I’ve got photos of at least a couple different species. Since there are something like 1,300 longlegged fly species in the country, I have a good chance of being right, but as I’ve tried to make clear, I’m not good at fly identification, so I’m not making assumptions just yet.

There is a lot of Maximilian sunflower growing in the plot. Many of the stems have some kind of insect burrowing inside them. The holes look like woodpecker nests in trees, except they’re in sunflower stems, are much smaller, and have lots of insect frass (poop) coming out of them. I didn’t want to tear apart any of the stems in my plot, but I did sacrifice one on a plant nearby, just to see if I could find the inhabitant.

As a result, the photo below is the only one in this post that wasn’t taken from within my plot, but I’m hoping it might represent a very similar-looking larva inside the stems I did photograph inside the plot. If I had to guess (which is all I can do at the moment) I’d guess it’s a fly larva. I say that partly because it kind of looks like a fly larva and mostly because of statistical probability, given the abundance of flies hanging around.

As the only wildflower blooming in the plot at the moment, eastern black nightshade has attracted a lot of my attention. It’s an annual that probably germinated because of this spring’s prescribed fire. Like other species in the nightshade family (including tomatoes) this is a ‘buzz pollinated’ species that releases pollen when a bee vibrates its wing muscles at the right frequency. It’s a tough process to photograph, but I’ve not even had a chance to try yet because I’ve not seen any bees visiting the plants in my plot.

While I haven’t seen any pollinators on the nightshade plants yet, the plant did have a bunch of insect visitors back on August 3. If the plants could vote, I’m betting they would have preferred pollinators to the gaggle of blister beetles that showed up and – within a single day – completely defoliated the couple of plants inside the plot. The beetles left behind the flowers, fruits, and stems, but every scrap of leaf was consumed within just a few hours. I’m guessing on the duration of the visit since I wasn’t there when they arrived or left. However, based on how quickly things were happening when I was there, I think it’s a good estimate.

I’m pretty sure the beetles were Epicauta immaculata, aka ‘the immaculate meloid’. Bugguide experts were comfortable saying the beetle was in the genus Epicauta, and based on some reading I did on the diet of various Epicauta species, I think E. immaculata is likely the right identification. However, just as with flies, my standard caveat applies – I’m not an expert, so I could very easily be wrong.

Either way, there were at least nine of the blister beetles hanging out that day, and maybe more than that. They were large, with most measuring longer about an inch or so in length. They also appeared to be very hungry. By the time I showed up and found them, they’d already eaten about half of the plants’ leaves and they made very noticeable progress during the hour or so I was there watching them.

I came back the following day, curious to see what was left of the plants. The fruits and flowers were still intact, but the rest of the plants were stripped down to the skeleton (stems). I’ll be curious to see if the remaining flowers and fruits can mature without leaves to photosynthesize and create food from sunlight. So far, the fruits look like they’re continuing to ripen.

There’s more to say, but this post is already way too long, so I’ll just end with a few more photos of plot visitors:

It’s almost Maximilian sunflower and pitcher sage season! I check frequently to see if any of the flower buds have opened, but nothing yet. Be prepared for a lot of yellow in my next update – there are a LOT of sunflower plants in the plot this year. Meanwhile, the project rolls on, regardless of what’s blooming or not. There’s a different story every time I visit!

Thanks for hanging in there with me. If you’ve read all the way to the end of this post, I’m both impressed and grateful. I hope you have the opportunity to find your own little patch of nature to visit!