Tag Archives: prairie management

Neighborhood Watch

Posted on by
Reply

When making management plans for a prairie, it’s a good idea to look over the fence to see what the neighbors are doing.  It’s important to think about how your prairie fits into the landscape, and even more important to think about what you can do to complement the prairie habitats/conditions around you.  If your prairie is the only one around for miles, you’ve got bigger problems than this post will be able to address (I’ll hit that topic in the future, though).   If there ARE other prairies – or at least grasslands – nearby, continue reading…

There are many ways to make your prairie provide a complement to the ecological contributions of others in the landscape.  Rather than trying to cover all of them, here are three examples:

Grassland Birds

Though focused on birds, this section really applies to small mammals, insects, and any other animals that rely on a particular kind of habitat structure (or multiple kinds) for survival as well.  Many times, the majority of prairies/grasslands in a neighborhood are managed so that the vegetation structure in all of them looks pretty much the same.  In some cases, the landscape may be full of grazed pastures – all with relatively short grass.  This might provide excellent habitat for species like grasshopper sparrows and upland sandpipers (depending upon how large each grassland patch is) but doesn’t do much for dickcissels and Henslow’s sparrows.  On the flip side, other landscapes have an abundance of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) or other grasslands that are rarely burned or grazed and consist mainly of tall thatchy vegetation.  In either case, thinking about how your prairie could provide some vegetation structure that is rare or absent from the surrounding landscape can really benefit species requiring that habitat type.

Dickcissels are large sparrows that prefer tall weedy habitats, and aren't likely to be found in prairie landscapes with only short vegetation structure.

A somewhat more complicated scenario applies to a few species that require different habitat types for each season.  Prairie chickens, northern bobwhites, and ring-necked pheasants, for example, need to be able to move back and forth between nesting and brood-rearing habitat without having to travel very far.  Nesting cover (which may double as winter cover) typically consists of relatively dense vegetation that can conceal a nest and the female sitting on it.  However, newly-hatched chicks have to be able to travel through that cover to nearby feeding areas, so it can’t be so dense that those chicks can’t make their way around in it.  Ideal brood-rearing cover has areas of relatively tall wildflowers or weedy vegetation without dense grass at the ground level – this allows adults and chicks to easily move around and chase insects, but also provides overhead protection from predators.  The interspersion of nesting and brood-rearing cover across the landscape is a key factor in the annual survival of these species.  If the prairie adjacent to yours is providing excellent habitat for one of those two life stages, providing the other in your prairie might fill a critical habitat need.

Obviously, there are any number of other vertebrates and invertebrates that have habitat structure requirements.  Even without knowing what those requirements are, you can help provide for them by simply trying to manage your prairie to fill in gaps in the landscape – or to improve the interspersion of those habitat types in the neighborhood.  Sometimes it’s as simple as ensuring that the vegetation structure in your prairie contrasts with what’s around you.  In other cases, timing of management can be important.  If your neighbor cuts hay in mid-July, for example, there will likely be quite a few newly-fledged grassland birds, small mammals, and other animals looking for refuge.  If you plan to hay your prairie as well, delaying for a month or so can give those species at least a temporary reprieve – and in the case of many birds, may give them enough habitat to last them until migration time.  Leaving a portion of your prairie unhayed, of course, could also be valuable.  Another example related to timing could be to try to stagger the timing of your prescribed fires with your neighbor so that you’re not both burning your prairie in the same year (or season). 

Bees

Bees are one of the most important groups of insects in prairies because of their effectiveness as pollinators.  The two primary needs of bees are nesting habitat and food.  Bees have varying requirements for nesting habitats, but many either need bare ground for burrows or old woody debris.  Looking around to see whether neighboring properties provide that kind of habitat could help you think about what to do on your own land. 

A native bee on a prairie wild rose.

In terms of food, it’s important for bees and other pollinators to have consistent sources of nectar and pollen throughout the season.  It can be valuable – and instructive – to keep track of when each flower species blooms in your prairie and that of surrounding prairies (including roadsides and gardens).  Imagine yourself as a native solitary bee with a feeding radius of about ¼ mile around its nest.  Could you find something to eat on every day of the growing season?  If there are gaps during the season when there’s really nothing blooming in the neighborhood – or only a few flowering species blooming – that could identify an important gap to address.  Often, early season flowers are hard to come by, but there may also be mid-season gaps due to management practices (haying, burning, grazing) or simply because there are no/few flower species that happen to bloom at that time.

Providing for pollen and nectar resources in your neighborhood could be as easy as ensuring your prescribed fires, haying, and/or grazing activities aren’t happening simultaneously with that of your neighbors.  In other cases, it might be that you could manage in a way that encourages flowering plants during a time period when not much is blooming elsewhere nearby.  Regardless, it’s an interesting and important aspect of habitat to pay attention to.

Plants

In landscapes where land management practices are very similar across all land parcels, there are likely to be plant species that become rare because they never get favorable growing conditions.  Identifying those species and altering your management to accommodate them – at least periodically – can be an important strategy.  If most of the neighbors are burning every spring, skipping a year now and then on your land might help some of those spring-growing plants to survive.  In landscapes where grazing is commonplace, most ranchers/farmers tend to employ a fairly standard – and repetitive – grazing system.  Identifying the impacts to plant species (good and bad) of the grazing systems around you can help you facilitate success for those species in your prairie.  On the other end of the spectrum, if no grazing is occurring in the surrounding landscape, there may be species that thrive under grazing that could benefit from some grazing on your own land.  Whatever the local situation, recognizing the impacts of the management occurring around you on plant species can help you design management strategies that can prop up populations of plants that are otherwise struggling.

Caution!

It’s important to remember that the above examples and suggestions are just that – and may not apply to your situation.  Even more importantly, it’s not a good idea to implement a repetitive management system on your own prairie to contrast with the repetitive management system(s) of your neighbors.  (In other words, don’t manage exclusively for dickcissels just because the neighbors are managing exclusively for grasshopper sparrows…)

Repetitive management that decreases the ecological resilience of your prairie can lead to a weakened prairie community that can be more vulnerable to invasive species and other threats.  There’s no need to sacrifice the integrity of your prairie for the good of the neighborhood.  Instead, think about trying to maintain the highest plant and animal diversity you can on your own prairie – while also watching for opportunities to contribute rare or missing habitat components to the surrounding landscape.  The latter is an important, but secondary, consideration.

The prairie looks very much the same on both sides of this fenceline.

The ideal situation is one in which adjacent neighbors (or an entire neighborhood) coordinate their management so that each prairie is well-managed, but so that management actions aren’t synchronized across the landscape.  Staggering the timing of prescribed fires, haying, and grazing between neighbors to ensure that everyone isn’t doing the same thing during the same season can be very important. 

(Communication between neighbors about management can have additional benefits, of course, besides simply coordinating the timing or other aspects of management.  For example, talking about the success or failure of invasive species control efforts or observed trends in plant or animal responses due to particular management strategies can help everyone improve their own properties. )

The Upshot

Regardless of the size or location of your prairie, it’s valuable to look around the neighborhood as you plan your management each year.  I’ve provided a few examples of how one prairie can fill gaps left by the management of nearby prairies, but there are many more – each landscape is unique.  The key is simply to be thoughtful about your prairie management, and to remember that wildlife and plant populations don’t stop at the edges of your property.

The Myth of Self-Sustaining Prairies

Posted on by
16

Here’s a question I get asked occasionally:  “At what point will my prairie become self-sustaining?”

There are lots of ways “self-sustaining” can be defined, of course, but usually the person is hoping that at some point they can just step back and let the prairie do its thing with very little or no human input.  In other words, they hope the prairie will function like a machine.  Once you have it tuned up correctly, it’ll hum along just fine with only occasional inputs of fuel or maintenance.

Ah, that it would be so easy.  Unfortunately, there is a short answer to the question, and it’s a disappointing one.  The answer is, “It just doesn’t work that way.”

Here’s the short explanation of that short answer:

A prairie with no management at all accumulates thatch from each successive year of plant growth, and if not removed, that thatch eventually builds up to the point at which only a small number of plant species can survive.  Unfortunately, the most dominant of those surviving species tend to be either trees/shrubs or invasive plants.  In the eastern half of Nebraska, smooth brome tends to be a primary winner, along with tree species such as Siberian elm and eastern red cedar.

Besides the issue of thatch build-up, there are just too many threats, particularly from invasive species and trees, for prairies to maintain their species compositions and ecological functions without human management.  This is particularly true with tallgrass prairies in an agricultural matrix.  The degree of vulnerability to invasion depends upon soil type and the surrounding landscape.  Some soil types seem favor invasives more than others – oftentimes, high soil nitrogen levels can favor exotic grasses, for example.  The degree of invasive species pressure on a prairie is also influenced by the abundance and proximity of those invaders in the neighborhood around the prairie . However, all prairies (that I’m aware of) have some degree of vulnerability to invasive species.

Active management, such as the application of prescribed fire, is needed to prevent excessive thatch buildup and to help suppress invasive species.

That’s the short answer.  A longer and better answer is that tallgrass and mixed-grass prairies are not “climax communities” in the classic sense.  In my early ecology classes, I learned that terrestrial plant communities move through a process called succession from bare ground to some final stable state – usually a forest.   Bare ground is colonized by opportunistic species, which are eventually pushed out by longer-lived grasses and wildflowers.  Those grassland species are then replaced by various generations of tree species, each topping out the other until a final set of tall long-lived trees becomes dominant and creates a stable community.  Disturbances such as fire or severe weather events might set back succession temporarily, but the process keeps moving toward that climax community.

Prairies don’t fit that successional model very well.  Prairies are maintained (and defined?) by disturbances such as fire, grazing, and drought.  Without some combination of those ecological processes, prairies turn into woodlands.  Because of that, some might argue that prairies are simply an ephemeral stage of the longer successional process, and not really a stable ecosystem.  Others might argue that the whole idea of ecological succession is overly simplistic and not representative of the way all ecosystems function.

Without getting into that larger argument, the real point is that if we agree prairies are important, and we want to maintain them, active management is necessary.  Some people point to expansive prairies in Great Plains landscapes and wonder if those prairies could maintain themselves without humans if given the chance.  After all, lightning-caused fires and roaming herds of bison should be able to take care of things without interference from people, right?  In reality, we don’t have any historical precedent to back that up.  Today’s prairies have only been around since the last ice age –  about 10,000 years (less in the east, more in the west.)  During that entire time, people have been active managers of those prairies.  Fires set by Native Americans were much more abundant and extensive than lightning-caused fires.  Bison herds, and many other herbivores, responded to those fires by focusing grazing in those recently burned areas.  That intensive fire/grazing disturbance interacted with and compounded the impacts of long droughts, floods, and other weather-related events.  Cumulatively, those major disturbances maintained the integrity of prairies.

Along with climate and fire, bison (and other grazers/herbivores) were a major force that shaped prairies. However, people and their activities were also an important component of the process.

There’s really no way (and no reason) to separate people from prairie.  Regardless of the intent or motivation of the people who manage prairies – historically or now – their actions have tremendous impacts.  Similarly, inaction by people who control prairies has tremendous impacts as well.  In the natural resource management world, the phrase “No management is still management” is well-worn but nevertheless true.

Of course, defining the need for continual human management – even in the absence of today’s new challenges such as invasive species – doesn’t solve the problem.  What kind of management is needed?  How do we know when to do what?  The answers to those questions are complex, still being debated, and the primary subject of this blog, my book on prairie management, and myriad discussions among prairie managers around the world.

Some people who agree that prairies require some level of active management still search for a relatively simple management recipe to follow.  Annual haying or burning or two to three-year rotations of fire or grazing are examples of management regimes that are commonly used and advocated for.  This is really just a small step up from the idea that prairies should maintain themselves.  In this case, the argument is that prairies should be able to maintain themselves if we just provide them the right basic disturbance framework.

I’ve given my opinion on simple, repetitive management regimes often within this blog (see my Calendar Prairies post as an example).  I think repetitive management threatens plant diversity because there are always some plant species that are favored in a particular management regime and others who are not.  Over time, those species not favored will inevitably fade out of the community if the same regime is applied over and over.  Perhaps more importantly, animal species – including insects – with fairly specific habitat structure requirements are similarly affected.  Some species thrive under repetitive management if that management consistently favors them.  However, those animals that don’t find what they need in that management system can’t normally survive for many years in suboptimal habitat like many perennial plants can.   Animals without appropriate habitat either move or die – and in fragmented landscapes, or in landscapes where the same management is in place across the entire landscape, moving may not be a viable option.

Annual haying provides good growing conditions for many plants - especially those the bloom and produce seed prior to the haying date. On the other hand, some of the plant species favored by annual haying (including smooth brome) can become invasive. In addition, some desireable native plant species do poorly under annual hay management and eventually disappear from those prairies.

All of this adds up to one conclusion.  Diverse, functioning prairies require active, constant, and thoughtful management by humans.  There’s no getting out of that responsibility.  If we choose not to be active thoughtful managers, we are choosing to let prairies degrade, and we’ll have to live with the consequences (“No management is still management”).  Hopefully, though, most people with influence over the management of prairies will embrace their role, and be active managers – as well as active participants in ongoing discussions about the impacts of various management techniques and systems.

Though active prairie management is time-consuming, and often expensive, it’s also extremely rewarding.  Whether it’s a small backyard prairie garden, a 20,000 acre grassland, or something in-between, every year is a chance to try new things, see what happens, and learn from the experience.  More importantly, the diversity of plant, insect, and invertebrate species in well-managed prairies – large and small – is its own reward.  Who could ask for more than that?