om Nebraska, conserving any prairie in North America should be something we all care about. Through the restoration project at the Homestead National Monument, park staff has been able to bring back many of the original and diverse plants of the prairie (National Park Service, 2011).
On the National Parks Service website for the Homestead National Monument of America, James and Debacker in their Plant Community Monitoring Trend Report from 2007, state that currently there are 116 different species of plants present at the Homestead.
In an interview on August 14, 2011, with Jesse Bolli, who is a Resource Management Specialist at the Homestead National Monument, about 60 acres of the land is native trees, 100 acres is the prairie, which is broken into 20% for thicket, 25% for grasses and roughly 55% for forbs and other plants. The main ways they help control and encourage the prairie growth is through controlled burns, some mowing, and little herbicide. Controlled burns at the Homestead started in 1970. In 1990 the rotation was changed to a three year rotation and again in 2004 to burn 2/5 every year, taking the 4 year to rest. The Homestead uses herbicide only when needed and on a low level setting so as not to spray a large area.
Now that I have told you about the efforts at the Homestead National monument in restoring and conserving the prairie, let’s take a look a little closer to us and see what SCC is doing to conserve the natural prairie. Southeast Community College started its restoration program in 2007 to conserve what they can of the original plants. In an interview on August 14, 2011 with Nate Walker, who works here on the SCC campus in the Prairie Partnership office, SCC began with a high diversity planting with seeds from the Prairie Plains Resource Institute. Only local seed from around Nebraska was chosen to be planted, because plants outside Nebraska may affect other plant species growth or may be too weak to thrive under our soil conditions.
There were 16 species of grasses, five species of sedges, 17 species of legumes, 41 species of composites and 40 species of forbs planted in the high diversity planting which totals about 119 species. Another 10 to 20 species were collected and added later and about 10 species of weedy natives were present naturally (N. Walker, 2011).
As we see in these pictures I took here at SCC, the flowers are tall and vibrant, while the grasses are a little shorter yet. This makes for better health for the ecosystem. The cycle of burning, grazing(which neither SCC nor the Homestead do), produces flowers that are higher in the graze lands and burn spots and eventually give way to the grasses in the summer and fall months (N. Walker, 2011).
Bolli, J. Resource Management Specialist at the Homestead National Monument of America
(personal communication, interview, August, 14, 2011).
Carey, J. (2000, June-July). Little habitat on the prairie - only remnants remain of the nation's original prairie, and biologists are scrambling to understand and restore what is left. National Wildlife.
James, K., & DeBacker, M. (2007). Plant community monitoring trend report. Homestead National Monument of America.
Kerlin, K. (2002, May-June). Return of the native: Natural prairies slowly make a comeback. E, 13, 3, 22.
National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior. (2011, May). Nature and science. Retrieved from http://www.nps.gov/home/naturescience/index.htm
Osterhoudt, S. (2001, Fall). A prairie primer. OnEarth, 23, 3, 27.
Walker, N. Prairie Partnership at SCC (personal communication, interview, August, 9, 2011)
Photo credits: Katie Graham
Friday, August 19, 2011
Has anyone here ever wondered what it was like Homesteading in Alaska? Well, I did and I am here to share with all of you what I learned and discovered about the challenges and obstacles homesteader faced in Alaska.
Now, take a moment and imagine what it was like living in Alaska during the late 1800’s into the mid 1900’s when the United Stated first purchased Alaska and homesteaders began claiming the land. In the article Alaska Divi