The Do's and Don'ts of Tallgrass Prairie Restoration - Heather Bass Presents Her Research
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 28 июл 2024
- What does it take to restore a native Texas tallgrass prairie and in particular its cornerstone grass species Little Bluestem? That’s what Heather Bass of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT) asked herself before embarking on a four-year study of prairie plots in the Dallas Fort Forth area. Watch this talk to see how she went about her research and what findings she produced.
Excellent video I really want to keep an eye on their work now!
Thank you for the facinating video. Especially found the idea of forgoing landscaping the quarry for fear of disrupting the little bluestem ecosystem interesting. The diverse homestatic niches in a grassland ecosystem are facinating. I'm attempting to reclaim an area of non native grassland with little bluestem and blue gramma and hopefully over time, mother nature will provide the diversity... after watching this video, however, I suspect all my effort would muck with an ecosystem that would simply take care of itself.
The bio amendment had too much bateria food (the molassas), that is why it encouraged the johnson and bermuda grasses. It should have had much more fugal foods and a much higher fugal content than it apparently did. It would be interesting to see a bio amendment made with the native soil in the compost to begin with, then the tea made with more fungal foods, the results might be rather fascinating.
Good thought - thanks for sharing!
Last year i let ambrosia trifida etiolate those two and invasive annual forbs and also pulled them here and there. I suspect it removed alot of "bacteria food" because the only plants that can really share space with it are there species that are more symbiotic with fungi. Might as well use our aggressive annual super weed, it's a great carbon crop that can be pruned into canes by wacking the branches off and then stepped on very late in the growing season before it starts dropping pollen, or you can let it go to seed and step on the canes outwards so you can expand next year's invasive species removal front and plant ur good seeds where it was growing. This worked very well where I did it, I'm left with a ton of composting and mulch material, gave me some much-needed shade and clean air during the summer and the insect life exploded. Now I'm working in other annuals to do the same corn, tree okra from West Africa, very exciting.
So yeah maybe it helps to live on site if you want to restore an area that is mostly invasive biomass. I think a more synchronic, biointensive, hands on approaches that apply the principles(and politics)of agroecology to the process of natural succession is exactly what restoration efforts need to accomplish our dreams. not only that it's exactly what basic research in ecology needs to escape the epistemic and experimental limits of reductionism, the exact opposite of species removal experiments.
I live in San Antonio and would like to apply some of these concepts to my garden. Right now I’m working on getting rid of Bermuda grass. I would love to find somewhere near me that has native blank land prairie grasses so I could use in my garden.
Native American Seed have native grass and forb seeds for sale. Grass seed is especially easy to germinate and grow in containers for later planting in the garden. Outside pride have forb seeds
that often germinate readily. Both nurseries are worth checking out.
The prairie ecosystem needs ruminant animals. This a landscape project, not a restoration.