The Prairie Enthusiasts

29 October 2008 - 08:04, Stan Kaufman said:
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We’ve just learned of a great group operating in southern Illinois and Wisconsin — The Prairie Enthusiasts.

This group organizes itself into local chapters that locate and manage prairie remnants. They provide lots of hands-on work collecting and processing seed, planting, weeding, etc. They currently manage over 100 sites that cover over 4000 acres — owning outright 18 sites with 942 acres, conservation easements on over 800 acres more, and management agreements for the rest. They’ve planted over 500 acres in their reconstruction efforts. They also do educational projects (a newsletter, lectures, and fieldtrips) to spread the word.

Here is a nice news report about their activities.

In many ways, this is like the Dyck Arboretum’s Prairie Window Project on a much larger scale — multiplied by the “local chapter” structure.

This is truly an impressive effort that represents one model of what the “Remnant Prairies Association” might become in Kansas.

Herbivores on the Prairies

22 October 2008 - 12:05, Stan Kaufman said:
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It’s always exciting to see large herbivores restored to a prairie, and here’s the latest case. The Broken Kettle Grasslands managed by the Nature Conservancy in Iowa has just re-introduced 30 bison. Initially the bison will be held in a 125 acre “trap pasture” during the winter, but then they’ll have the rest of the grasslands 3000 acres to recreate in.

Of course, most remnant prairies don’t have 3000 or even 300 acres and so aren’t candidates for bison. An alternative in use in a quite different situation in California are goats. To avoid over-grazing, careful herding obviously is necessary. If enough remnant prairies could be organized in relatively close proximity, this would seem to offer an interesting opportunity to someone with goat herds in need of grazing.

These two items came to us via the regular newsletter of the Society of Ecological Restoration. This group is definitely worth joining so you get their newsflashes directly, but we’ll continue to re-post news of interest here.

New Web Site Launched!

19 October 2008 - 14:53, Stan Kaufman said:
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In order to facilitate a current email discussion about how best to preserve and protect remnant prairies, we’ve launched this web site. It offers a variety of collaborative communication tools that we hope provide a more useful format for deliberation.

Presuming we generate some inertia moving forward, this same web site will allow us to deploy a variety of information management tools that will be useful for managers of specific remnant prairies — to track the species in their prairies and the floristic quality of their lands, and to plan and execute work events.

This is entirely an experimental venture at this point, and we hope that you will signup and login here in order to contribute your ideas about what direction this might go. Thanks for your interest!