Tag Archives: grassland

How Do You Evaluate Your Prairie?

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The most challenging aspect of prairie management may be evaluating what’s happening on the land and what to do about it.  What should you focus on as you walk around a prairie?  Which plant species can tell you the most about the current condition of the prairie community?  How do you know whether changes in the plant community are short term weather-related changes, versus an indication of a long term trend?  What characteristics of wildlife habitat are the most important to monitor?  It can all seem overwhelming.

Evaluating prairies and impacts of management is important but can seem overwhelming. What should you look for as you walk through a prairie? (Scott Moats at The Nature Conservancy's Broken Kettle Grasslands in northwest Iowa.)

Evaluating prairies and impacts of management is important but isn’t necessarily easy. What should you look for as you walk through a prairie? (Scott Moats at The Nature Conservancy’s Broken Kettle Grasslands in northwest Iowa.)

This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.  One of my main jobs is to help people restore and manage their prairies more effectively.  I try to share tips and techniques gleaned from our work on the Platte River Prairies, as well as from my experiences visiting and collaborating with other prairie managers across the country.  However, suggestions of management strategies are only useful if a prairie manager knows what challenges his/her prairie is facing.  Some managers are good at thinking about wildlife habitat needs but struggle to evaluate plant composition changes.  Others may focus so heavily on invasive species encroachment they ignore the needs of pollinators or grassland birds.  With so many things to think about, what are the most important?

As I walk through the prairies I work with, I pay close attention to (among other things) the abundance and vigor of particular plant species and note the distribution of certain habitat qualities.  My mental checklist is influenced by years of watching those sites respond to weather and management, as well as by the management objectives I’m evaluating.  However, I also enjoy having other ecologists and managers visit our sites because I can learn a great deal from their perspectives.  Because they have a different set of experiences than I do, they notice and evaluate different factors than I do.

This prairie was burned and grazed with a fairly light stocking rate last year. It has not been grazed this year. When I walked it this week, I was looking at the vigor of the dominant grasses (still low) and the wildflowers (high). I also wanted to see if it had maintained the mixed-height habitat structure I was hoping for (it had).

This prairie was burned and grazed with a fairly light stocking rate last year. It has not been grazed this year. When I walked it this week, I was looking at the vigor of the dominant grasses (still low) and the wildflowers (high). I also wanted to see if it had maintained the mixed-height habitat structure I was hoping for (it had).

Because the process of evaluating prairies and their management needs is both important and potentially overwhelming, I want to try to develop some basic guidelines – a kind of checklist for evaluating prairies.  I need help, so I’m reaching out to others, including the readers of this blog, for their input.

What do you look at as you walk through the prairies you’re familiar with?  How do you know whether a prairie you’re managing is headed in the right or wrong direction?  Are there particular plant or animal species that you feel are good indicators of the larger prairie community?  Tell me about your mental checklist…

Please leave any suggestions and ideas you have in the comments section below (if you don’t see a comments section, click on the title of this post and then look again).  I’ll try to synthesize your thoughts and mine and see if we can come up with something useful.  Thank you very much for your help.

To get you started, here are a few examples of items on my personal mental checklist:

How many species of pollinator plants are blooming right now, and how abundant are they?

Are the populations of our most dangerous invasive species increasing or decreasing?

Which plant species are being grazed by our cattle and which are they ignoring?

Are new plants germinating and establishing themselves or is the “canopy” of existing plants stifling new growth?

Are there patches of vegetation structure types present that represent the full spectrum of habitat types? (tall/rank, short/sparse, mixed-height, etc.)

 

if you were a bee, would you find a good selection of feeding options throughout the season?

If you were a bee, would you find a good selection of feeding options throughout the season?

 

Photo of the Week – July 24, 2014

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I’m definitely a better close-up photographer than a landscape photographer.  Part of that is just the way my mind works – I tend to look down instead of up when I walk around a prairie.  I can always find an interesting flower or insect to photograph when the light is good for photography, but I have a harder time constructing an interesting composition or the larger landscape.  There are so many things to think about with landscape photos; foreground, background, sky, leading lines – or not… ack!  As a result, when the light is pretty, I usually look around for something small and interesting.

However, there are days and places where even I can take good landscape photos, and yesterday was a perfect example.  I got up early enough to drive the 35 minutes between my house and our Platte River Prairies before sunrise.  I’d been eyeing the prolific blooming of fourpoint evening primrose (Oenothera rhombipetala) in the sandhills on the edge of the river valley.  It’s been several years since we’ve seen a big explosion of primrose flowers, and this year’s seemed even more spectacular than the last one.

At the first glimpse of the sun, I knew it was a going to be good morning. The Nature Conservancy's Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

At the first glimpse of the sun, I knew it was a going to be good morning. The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.

Before the sun popped over the horizon, I wandered around and pretended there was enough light to make good photographs, knowing that I was only shooting because digital photos are free…  Once the sun appeared, though, things got serious.

Goodness gracious

Fourpoint evening primroses all the way to the horizon.

How can you not take great photos when you’re surrounded by big yellow flowers, the sky is filled with gorgeous clouds, and the light is coming in low and warm?  I scurried around with my camera and tripod, trying composition after composition, and liking each one more than the one previous.  The biggest difficulty was trying to come up with photographs that really showed the size, scope, and abundance of the flowers in real life.  My wide angle lens felt insufficiently wide for the scene.

More primoses

More primroses

I ended up with hundreds of photographs of primroses.  I stayed up late last night trying to go through them and pick out a handful to use for today’s post.  I felt good when I narrowed them down to 20, but that’s way too many for one blog post – especially when they all look about the same…  I went to sleep dreaming about fields of yellow.

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This morning, I managed to narrow it down to the photos you see here, but it was painful.  Stop by sometime and I’ll show you the others…!

The ecology behind the photos

So why are there so many fourpoint evening primroses this year?  Across the sandy prairies of Nebraska, fourpoint primrose is having a good year, though maybe not as good of a year as sunflowers had last year.  Fourpoint evening primroses are biennial plants, so they typically germinate and form a rosette (just leaves, no vertical stems) in their first year of life and then bloom and die in their second – leaving behind many thousands of seeds to kickstart the next generation.  They are not strong competitors with grasses, so fourpoint primroses can’t germinate in years when the vegetation is dense.

Ok, I did take a FEW close-ups too. Every day, the primose opens a new row of buds as the previous days' flowers wilt. Judging by the unopened buds at the tops of these flowers, we'll be seeing yellow for a while yet.

Ok, I did take a FEW close-ups too. Every day, the primrose opens a new row of buds as the previous days’ flowers wilt. Judging by the unopened buds at the tops of these flowers, we’ll be seeing yellow for a while yet.

The year 2012 was the most severe one-year drought on record for our area.  That weakened the grasses in our sandhills prairie.  Coincidentally, however, we also burned and grazed those hills in 2012.  As a result, by July, the hills were covered in very short brown grass and not much else because the plants had given up and gone dormant in the face of intense grazing and no soil moisture.  It looked pretty tough.  We had better moisture in 2013, and the grasses started their slow recovery, but there was a lot of open space between them that was colonized by annual plants (such as annual sunflowers).  However, another major colonizer was fourpoint evening primrose.  Unlike the sunflowers, however, the primrose plants didn’t bloom last year – they bided their time and soaked in the sun, water, and nutrients made available by the low density of plants surrounding them.  Then, this summer – 2 years after the drought – they made their move and exploded onto the scene with resplendent glory.  Or something.  Anyway, they sure are pretty.

We’ve had lots of rain this year, and we’re not grazing those sandhills this year, so the grass is getting pretty dense beneath the primrose flowers.  That means we won’t see many primroses next year or the year after.  That’s ok, they’ll wait – and when the time is right, they’ll be back.

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