The Annual Grassland Restoration Network Workshop – Coming to A Prairie Near You (If You’re Near Columbia, Missouri)

The Grassland Restoration Network is a loose affiliation of those of us trying to use prairie restoration (reconstruction) as a way to rebuild, conserve and sustain grassland ecosystems.  Each year, we put on a workshop to share ideas, techniques, research results, and stories with other.  Workshops are hosted by a different site each year, giving us the opportunity to visit a range of projects over the years. 

Kicking the dirt together helps us better understand challenges and strategies being employed at each others’ sites, but also stimulates better discussions than when we’re sitting in a sterile hotel conference room.  The workshops tend to minimize lectures and maximize both formal and informal discussion time.  I missed the 2012 workshop, but you can read my posts about the 2011 workshop in Indiana by clicking here.

A field discussion at the 2009 Grassland Restoration Network in Nebraska.

Bill Whitney, of Prairie Plains Resource Institute, leads a field discussion during the 2009 Grassland Restoration Network in Nebraska.

This year’s workshop will be hosted by the Missouri Department of Conservation in Columbia, Missouri from July 16-18.  If you are interested in attending, you can download the preliminary agenda and registration information by clicking here. 

In addition, you can follow the activities of the Grassland Restoration Network on our new blog/website, initiated by Bill Kleiman, at Nachusa Grasslands.  That link is here.

A Weekend Walk in the Woods

We visited family in eastern Nebraska this weekend.  My in-laws have an oak woodland that I’ve become familiar with over the years, and I was glad to have a little time to wander through it.  Because of the cool spring, I was curious to see if anything had started blooming.  Trout lilies, dutchman’s breeches, violets, and other wildflowers were up and growing, but the only flowers I found weren’t really flowers – they were moss sporophytes …and even they were few and far between.

The only blooms in the oak woodland weren't even real flowers.

This patch of moss was one of the few patches in “bloom” this weekend in an oak woodland south of Omaha, Nebraska.

By mid-April in most years, I would have expected to see violets in bloom, and would have had a decent shot at seeing flowers on trout lilies and woodland phlox as well.  Not this year.  Instead, I gave up on flowers and spent some fruitless time trying to find one of the chorus frogs that were calling down by the creek.  Having failed at that, I went back up the hill and looked more closely at the moss.  Why fight it?

A close-up of moss sporophytes.  Sarpy County, Nebraska.

A close-up of moss sporophytes. Sarpy County, Nebraska.

Ironically, the most colorful things I found in the woods weren’t plants, but invertebrates.  I saw several tiny red mites crawling around in the leaf litter – including the one below, which contrasted nicely with the lush green moss it was exploring.

A tiny red mite

A tiny red mite, about 2mm long.  Photographed with a Nikon 105mm lens and extension tubes on a Nikon D300s camera, assisted by two small flash units.

Spring flowers will come eventually.  In the meantime, the delayed growth does have its advantages.  In both woodlands and prairies, soil moisture is still low from last season’s drought.  The longer it takes for plants to start using water, the more moisture will be left for summer wildflowers.  Personally, I’m in no big rush.