Tag Archives: grassland management

Using Defoliation of Dominant Grasses to Increase Prairie Plant Diversity

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 In many prairies, the primary suppressors of plant diversity are dominant grasses – both native and non-native.  These grasses, left unchecked, can monopolize light, moisture, and nutrients to the point that few other plant species can coexist with them.  I’m not sure why some prairies suffer from this more than others.  There is some evidence that hemi-parasitic and allelopathic plants such as pussy toes, false toadflax, and wood betony can play a role in suppressing grasses and facilitating forb diversity, but I don’t think that’s the whole answer because I’ve seen very diverse prairie plant communities without those species – or with only a few scattered populations of them.  Regardless of the reasons, we are left with many prairies that have lost – or are losing – plant diversity through domination by grasses, and we have to decide what to do with them.  Some of those prairies are restored (reconstructed) prairies that started out with high plant diversity but have since lost much of that diversity.  Others are remnant prairies that have been degraded by overgrazing and/or broadcast herbicide application.  Still others are relatively diverse remnant prairies that are slowly losing diversity as individual forbs die without reproducing.

Big bluestem. A good native grass, but sometimes so dominant that overall plant diversity suffers.

I think one of the best tools we have for combating grass domination in prairies is defoliation – the removal of above-ground portions of plants.  Defoliation has always been a major component of prairie ecosystems through fire and herbivory, and mowing and (non-lethal “burn back”) herbicide applications are additional options at our disposal today.  Plants respond to defoliation in various ways, depending upon the severity of defoliation, the frequency and/or duration of the defoliating event, the stage of the plant’s growth at the time of defoliation, and each species’ genetic programming.  The way each plant, and its neighbors, respond to a defoliation event determines which plants will gain or lose territory.  In other words, defoliation influences the competition between plants – and manipulating competition between plants is really what most prairie management is all about. 

Some of the earliest research I’m aware of on the effects of prairie plant defoliation can be found in range management research from the 1950’s and 1960’s.  The earliest paper that is often cited from that era is by F.J. Crider, who documented the effects of defoliation on the root growth of grasses.  He (and others since) found that a severe defoliation of a grass plant resulted in an immediate cessation of root growth as plants reallocated resources from root growth to regrow leaves and stems.  More importantly, those grass plants actually abandoned sections of living roots as well – shrinking the total root mass of the plant fairly dramatically.  This makes sense, since the plant has to support those roots through photosynthesis, and a severe defoliation takes away most of the plant’s ability to photosynthesize. 

A simplified look at how dominant grasses can affect plant diversity. In the top example (A) grasses have monopolized both aboveground (light) and belowground resources (moisture and nutrients). After defoliation (B), both the above and belowground parts of the grasses have shrunk, freeing up resources and allowing other plants to establish within that lost territory. As the grasses recover from the stress of defoliation, their vigor and size increase, but the new plants have a fighting chance - at least for a while - to hold the new ground they've taken.

Those early range science research data provide some useful context for today’s prairie management, but those researchers were primarily trying to figure out the intensity of grazing they could employ while still maintaining a dominant stand of grass.  As prairie managers, by contrast, we want to reduce the dominance of grass to increase the diversity of other plants.  We can still learn from what those range scientists discovered; we just want to employ it in a different way.  Since plants primarily compete for light, moisture, and nutrients, we want to find ways to make those three kinds of resources more available to plants other than dominant grasses.  Defoliation can reduce shading aboveground (removal of leaves and stems), while simultaneously freeing up the availability of moisture and nutrients belowground (reduction of root masses).

In prairies where dominant grass species are suppressing plant diversity, we want to defoliate those grasses in a way that forces them to cede territory to other species.  In order for that to work, the first important factor is that the defoliation has to happen during the growing season.  Defoliating a dormant plant (e.g. with an early spring burn) doesn’t have any impact on its root system, which is a critically-important part of its competitive ability.  In order to force a plant to reallocate resources away from its roots, defoliation needs to take place after the plant has already invested significant resources in above-ground growth.  This is why a late-spring burn can have a significant (if temporary) impact on cool-season exotic grasses such as smooth brome.  Burning, grazing, or mowing grasses when they are just starting to flower has the biggest impact on most species because they have invested the maximum amount in their above-ground growth by that point.  Alternatively, repetitive mowing or grazing of grasses can also have a strong – and perhaps longer lasting – impact on their root systems because every time the grasses start to regrow, they get nipped off again, forcing them to regroup and reallocate resources time after time.

The immediate result of that kind of severe and/or repeated defoliation of dominant grasses is a release of opportunistic plants that thrive under low levels of competition.  This includes many annual and biennial plants, but also perennial plants that are built to move quickly into open space.  The quick flush of these plants often turns people off of defoliation because of a widely-held misperception that those “weedy” plants are outcompeting “good” plants.  In truth, the weedy plants are only able to grow because the competition that normally holds them in check has been suppressed.  When the defoliation event is over, the dominant grasses and other perennial plants will slowly recover their vigor – at which point the weedy plants will retreat and wait for another opportunity.  Rather than indicating a problem, I use the presence of weedy plants to tell me that my defoliation treatment has succeeded in weakening dominant grasses and has opened up space for other plants to take advantage of. 

As common as the overly-dominant grass problem is in prairie conservation, there is a frustrating scarcity of research that addresses it.  However, a recently-published research project by Kat McCain and others at Kansas State University provides some very nice insight into what can happen when dominant grass species are suppressed in a restored (reconstructed) prairie.  Kat and her colleagues studied plots of seeded prairie that had become heavily dominated by big bluestem and switchgrass over time.  They found that removing half or all of the big bluestem tillers (stems) – by clipping and herbicide application – from a plot significantly increased plant diversity.  Interestingly, removing switchgrass tillers in the same way had much less impact.  Following the removal of big bluestem tillers, the researchers saw increases in the vegetative cover of some forb species, including roundheaded bushclover (Lespedeza capitata),  pitcher sage (Salvia azurea), and blue wild indigo (Baptisia australis) within those plots, as well as new establishment of forb species including whorled milkweed (Asclepias verticillata), green antelopehorn milkweed (Asclepias viridis), leadplant (Amorpha canescens), roundheaded bushclover, and heath aster (Symphyotrichum ericoides).  In other words, suppression of big bluestem competition led to increased vigor among existing forbs and also allowed new plants to establish in the territory previously held by the dominant grass.  The study bolsters the theory that grass competition is suppressing forb diversity in many prairies, but also provides information on how plant communities might respond if that grass competition is reduced.

Of course there is a difference between simple defoliation and the kind of clipping/herbicide combination used by McCain and her colleagues.  In addition, most defoliation treatments (especially prescribed fire and haying) in prairie management are non-selective, meaning that all plants are simultaneously defoliated – not just the ones we want to suppress.  Uniform defoliation likely decreases some of the benefits of suppressing grass vigor because the vigor of the plants we hope will respond is suppressed as well.  However, there will be still be plants that can take advantage of the newly available light and soil resources following a uniform defoliation treatment, and by altering the timing of defoliations from year to year, we can ensure that a variety of species get the opportunity to respond.

Haying is a good example of uniform defoliation. Every plant gets cut at the same height and at the same time.

 

Ideally, though, we would like the ability to defoliate only those species that are suppressing plant diversity.  One way to do that is by using a selective herbicide such as Poast, which affects only grasses (not forbs, sedges, or other plants).  Poast is labeled for control of annual grasses, but at light rates can also provide short-term burn-back (defoliation) of perennial grasses as well, and some prairie managers have seen plant diversity increase following treatments.  Because it can kill annual grasses, and calibrating the appropriate application rate with the desired result can be tricky, it’s probably best to use this treatment on restored prairie rather than on remnant prairies for now – and to test it on small patches first. 

Another way to get selective defoliation is by the use of grazing.  In an earlier post, I described our use of patch-burn grazing in our Platte River Prairies as a way to increase and maintain plant diversity.  Patch-burn grazing is essentially a technique that uses patches of burned prairie within a larger prairie to attract grazing animals, concentrating grazing activity in those burned areas while allowing other areas to recover.  Under a light stocking rate, we find that cattle – even in the burned patches – are very selective about the plants they choose to eat.  Their top choice of grasses in the spring is smooth brome, and their summer favorite is big bluestem.  These happen to be two of the top three grasses that appear to stifle plant diversity in our prairies (the third is Kentucky bluegrass, which cattle like less well).  In our application of patch-burn grazing, a burned patch of prairie is normally grazed intensively for an entire season before the next patch is burned and cattle shift their attention to that.  That length of intense defoliation has significant impacts on the plants that are grazed – and again, under light stocking rates, the primary plants that are defoliated are smooth brome and big bluestem.  Interestingly, switchgrass is much less attractive to cattle and is often left ungrazed – or lightly grazed – in our prairies.  I found it intriguing (and encouraging!) that McCain and her colleagues found that switchgrass appeared to have much less impact on plant diversity than big bluestem did.

The effects of selective grazing in a restored prairie. This photo shows the burned patch with a patch-burn grazing system where a light stocking rate allows cattle to be selective about their eating preferences. Big bluestem is cropped very short, while other grasses and forbs are ungrazed or lightly grazed. Species such as hoary vervain aren't typically grazed even under high stocking rates, but many species such as purple prairie clover (front left), illinois bundleflower (middle left) and stiff sunflower (blooming) are commonly considered to be favorites of cattle - but only at higher stocking rates.

It would stand to reason that selective grazing of big bluestem and smooth brome would favor the expansion of the ungrazed plant species growing with those grasses.  While I’ve not had the time or resources to conduct much full-scale research (help wanted!), I do have data that supports that idea.  Through annual data collection of plant species frequency, I’ve found that the density of species (the number of plant species per 1m2 plot) increases by 20 to 30 percent in the year following the burn/graze treatment in a patch of prairie – in both restored and remnant prairies. 

Data from two prairies under patch-burn grazing. In both cases, the graphs show the number of plant species per square meter over time from the year of fire and intense grazing through the two subsequent years. The East Dahms site is a degraded remnant prairie and the Dahms 95 site is a restored prairie that was seeded in 1995 with over 150 plant species. The error bars represent 95% confidence intervals.

Of course, the increase I see in species density following grazing includes many plants such as ragweed and other opportunistic species, but I also see species like purple prairie clover (Dalea purpurea), Illinois bundleflower (Desmanthus illinoiensis), and stiff sunflower (Helianthus laetiflorus) respond as well.   In addition to seeing this in my plot data, I can walk out into the prairies and see seedlings of these species around the adult ungrazed plants.  Not all of those young plants survive their first year or two, but some permanent plot data I’ve looked at shows that at least some of them do.  By the way, I see similar post-grazing increases in plant species density and establishment of species like prairie clover under patch-burn grazing with higher stocking rates (less selective grazing) as well. 

As I said in my previous post on grazing, I’m not advocating that all prairies need to be grazed.  I’m not even advocating grazing as the solution to all prairies that suffer from overly-dominant grasses.  However, as we search for answers to address grass suppression of plant diversity, grazing certainly appears to be one viable alternative that is worth more investigation.  I’m continuing to experiment with variations in the way we employ fire and grazing treatments, and will keep learning as I go.  I’m also combining seed additions with those grazing treatments to see if I can take advantage of the open space created by defoliation to help establish new plants from seed – something that appears to happen rarely without some kind of suppression of surrounding vegetation.  I’m seeing some positive results, but it’s too early to know how well it will work long-term, and I’m still tweaking seeding rates and other factors.

Whether it’s grazing, prescribed fire, haying, or herbicide application, defoliation may be the most powerful tool available to help us suppress dominant grasses and increase plant diversity in prairies – where that is an issue.  The biggest obstacle to its application is probably the fear of causing damage to prairie by burning, cutting, or grazing plants during the growing season, but I think that fear ignores the resilience of prairie communities.  We still have a lot to learn about the most effective ways to apply defoliation to achieve our objectives, but the only way we’ll learn is by experimentation.  I hope you’ll join me in testing these methods and tracking the results.  If you do, please share what you learn with the rest of us so we can all work to figure this out.

The Problem with “Calendar Prairies”

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I think I first heard the term “calendar prairie” from my friend Bill Whitney of Prairie Plains Resource Institute.  He was talking about the mental image many people have of prairies that comes from seeing photographs of grasslands full of big showy flowers in books, posters, and calendars.  The term, and its implications for prairie management, has stuck with me over the years. 

 
 
 

An example of a "Calendar Prairie" photo. The Henry C. Greene Prairie at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.

 

Unrealistic Expectations

There are a couple of dangers associated with people holding a mental image of what a prairie is supposed to look like.  The first is that it’s easy for people to have unrealistic expectations for prairies.  I’m a photographer, so I know firsthand that flowery photos don’t always represent an accurate picture of the prairie in which the photos were taken.  Photographers are often drawn to the biggest patches of showy flowers, and by creative use of perspective they can make those patches look even showier than they look in real life.  The result is usually a beautiful photograph that someone familiar with the prairie might not recognize.  To be clear, I’m not saying this kind of photography is a bad; on the contrary, attractive photographs have been extremely important for building the public’s interest in prairies. 

However, photos dominated by big showy flowers have the potential to be counterproductive as well.  For example, I worry that someone whose only vision a prairie comes from a “calendar prairie” image will be disappointed when they first see a prairie in person.  Regardless of how wonderful that real-life prairie is, it’s unlikely to live up to the photograph(s) that person has seen.  If that happens, it’s possible that a possible prairie enthusiast might instead feel duped and decide that prairies aren’t their thing after all.

For people that are already prairie enthusiasts, or perhaps prairie owners/managers, calendar prairies can become an unfair standard by which they measure the prairies they’re familiar with.  I’ve been in some astonishingly showy tallgrass prairies, where photos full of big flowers are easy to take just by pulling out a camera and shooting randomly.  However, not all prairies look like that – nor should they – and the ones that do don’t usually look like that all season long.  There are numerous conditions (including topography, soil moisture, soil texture, management history, etc.) that determine the appearance of a prairie’s plant community.  Using a calendar prairie image as the standard by which all prairies is judged is obviously naïve – much like a young woman using a movie star as the standard by which she judges her own identity.  The value of a prairie can be judged in many ways, including by its habitat value for a wide range of animal and insect species, many of which do not rely on big showy flowers.  In fact, the biggest value of an individual prairie is its very individuality – its unique combination of species composition and habitat attributes makes a unique contribution to the larger prairie conservation mission.  (Read my earlier post on this topic.)

This is not to say that all prairies are perfect the way they are.  Most (all?) prairies can be improved, but goals for improvement should be based on increasing the value of those prairies for biological diversity – not on making them look more like a photograph.

Effects on Management

The second danger of a calendar prairie image is that it can affect the way a prairie is managed.  Prairie managers sometimes form a mental picture of what they want their prairie to look like.  Sometimes that picture is based on an unrealistic idea of what prairies should look like.  Other times, it’s based on a fond memory of what their prairie looked in a previous season.  Either way, the problem occurs when that manager tries to make the prairie look like that mental picture all the time.  Rather than managing the prairie in response to threats such as invasive species, or in ways that allow different plant and animal species to gain an advantage each year, the prairie gets the exact same management treatments every year.

A summer fire on The Nature Conservancy's Platte River Prairies. We've seen very interesting and positive responses from summer fires, with and without grazing. For example, I've been managing this prairie for more than 10 years and have only seen wind flower (Anemone caroliniana) twice - both times it was growing in the portion of the prairie that had been burned the previous summer.

 

When a prairie gets the same management each year (e.g. early spring fire or summer haying) some plants, animals, and insects that are favored by that management and others are not – year after year.  Eventually, those species that are put at a disadvantage each year can disappear from the prairie.  Sometimes the strategy seems successful to the manager because the plant community appears the same each year; they always see the same big showy flowers blooming, for example.  However, other plant species may be slowly fading away.  More importantly, many animals and insects that have specific requirements for habitat structure will have a difficult time surviving in a prairie that provides only a single habitat structure type across the entire prairie each year.  Even those animals and insects that thrive may become more at risk from predation because the number of predators and their focus on particular prey species can both grow when their food source is consistently available in the same place and abundance each year.

 In a large contiguous grassland landscape, individual parcels of land that are managed the same way every year may not be a big deal – as long as there is variety among parcels.  If the Brown prairie is managed with annual late-spring fire, the adjacent Smith prairie is managed with annual summer haying, and nearby prairies are managed with other strategies, the conglomeration may retain good biological diversity, even if each individual tract of land contains a relatively narrow set of species.  However, when neighbors manage in similar ways, or when isolated prairies are managed in ways that decrease the number of resident species over time, the entire landscape can lose diversity.  If that happens, it’s unlikely that the diversity will recover because there are no places for the lost species to recolonize from.

 Ideally, every prairie would have multiple management treatments applied to various parts of it each year.  For example, a portion might be burned, a portion idled, and a portion grazed, with those treatments shifting from place to place each year – not necessarily in a predictable manner.  In a prairie managed that way, most or all plant species are likely to find favorable conditions in which to grow and bloom every few years – something that is critical to their long-term survival.  Animals and insects in a prairie that has multiple management treatments across it have a good chance to find suitable habitat each year by moving to the portion of the prairie that is most favorable in that year.

Light grazing on a restored Platte River Prairie - cattle are grazing the grass but leaving most wildflowers ungrazed. Periodic grazing can certainly change the appearance of a prairie, but plants that are grazed recover quickly. In the meantime, the grazing can provide different habitat structure and opportunities for plant species that are normally suppressed by dominant grasses.

 Some prairies are small enough that splitting them into multiple management units is not feasible.  In those cases, just shaking up the management so that it’s not exactly the same each year can be important.  Idling a different portion of the prairie each year – even if those portions are small – can provide a refuge for some of the plant and animal species that might not do well under the management applied to the majority of the prairie.  However, when prairies are both very small AND isolated from other prairies, some insect and animal species will simply be unlikely to survive long-term, even with good non-repetitive management.  In those cases, the management objectives may need to be altered – those sites could be treated more like museum pieces than prairies.

 Regardless of a prairie’s size, repetitive management over time can limit its biological diversity.  Prairies evolved under chaotic conditions; fires, grazing, outbreaks of herbivores, and drought came and went, and prairie animals and plants developed strategies to adapt.  Not only can prairie species survive management that changes year to year, they can thrive on it.

 Conclusion

Relying on idealistic visions of what prairies should look like (Calendar Prairies) creates an unrealistic image of what prairies really are.  Prairies evolved as dynamic natural communities that changed in appearance from day to day and year to year.  Rather than selling the public and ourselves on the idea that prairies should consistently look like showy flower gardens, we should celebrate and facilitate their changeable nature.  Real prairies are much more interesting (and valuable) than flower gardens anyway.