This time, we're zooming in on a subset of the grasslands and savanna biome close to home, at least for me.  The prairie, often organized seemingly by the height of its grasses, is an ecoregion pretty unique to the midwestern United States and a bit of Canada.  Characterized by its notable lack of trees, yet surprising permanence, these habitats once stretched a large swathe of what is now the United States of America.

I'm lucky enough to live near and volunteer with one of the oldest prairie restoration projects in the U.S., the Schulenberg Prairie, so I'm excited to share a bit about this ecosystem with you!  Let's dive in!

​Definition & History

When European settlers first arrived in the New World, they brought with them a notion that forests were the perfect natural ecosystem.  Generally speaking, they considered trees to be the gold standard in a "proper" nature and grasses to be odd and in need of explanation if they were abundant.  It was a massive surprise when, as they traveled west, they saw more and more grassland rather than woodland.

​​This was so much so that they didn't really have a name to properly describe it.  The term "prairie," derived from the Latin "pratum" meaning meadow, is of French etymology, and was the popularized name for the area in Central North America during these exploration years.  As time passed, people would use prairie synonymously with grassland, insofar to consider agricultural land as prairie or weedy open lots as prairie.  It's almost like prairie was more of a concept than a firmly defined thing, and the further we get from it, the vaguer it seems.

The term ​prairie is of French descent and became the popularized name of the Central North American grasslands as there was no great English term to describe the region

​This is perhaps, in part, due to the rapid destruction of this ecosystem.  One of the prairie's primary characteristics is its naturally well-drained and nutrient-rich soils.  When this was first realized, it wasn't long before humans started converting it to crop and grazing land.  This happened so fast, with little regard for the intricacy of the ecosystem, that we have very few records of what the original prairie landscape was truly like, how it functioned, and why it did.

Needs & Maintenance

Thankfully, we have a handful of restoration projects throughout the United States to find what remnants we can of these ecosystems, and bring some of that back to areas where we can hopefully reproduce them and learn from their life cycles.  Most of our knowledge of prairies comes from these projects as well as knowledge learned from the indigenous American peoples.

Shortgrass prairies were found in the west Great Plains, while tallgrass was found in the east due in large part to local rainfall

As mentioned above, we normally hear about prairies in terms of the grasses that inhabit the area, namely tallgrass and shortgrass.  While this does help a bit in understanding the general look of the prairie, this doesn't necessarily mean that tall plants can't grow in shortgrass prairies or vice versa.  The types of plants do vary greatly and what grows where depends greatly on local precipitation.  Tallgrass prairies of the eastern Great Plains generally receive around 40 inches of rainfall annually, whereas the shortgrass of the western Great Plains gets roughly half that.  The result is a lusher tallgrass ecosystem and a stockier shortgrass one.

In addition to water needs, the prairie gets along best when it is the firmly established ecosystem in an area.  When forests encroach on its space, a prairie won't fair too well, but on its own, it is actually quite resilient.  Plants in the prairie aren't actually as close as they seem when in full bloom.  In dormant seasons, we can see that there is a fair bit of soil between the dormant plants.  Where they really shine is in their root systems, interconnected across the whole of the landscape.

This root behavior has actually brought ecologists to consider prairies as so-called closed communities.  They're so good at living amongst each other in a highly competitive environment, it's nigh impossible for weedy plants to take hold.  Somewhat humorously, these systems were one of the problems settlers initially faced when converting the prairie to farmland.  The roots were so abundant that new types of plows needed to be invented to even turn the soil for agricultural use.

You would think that with the very specific conditions needed for the prairie to take hold, it would likely need a lot of maintenance.  Well, that's one of the fascinating things about prairies.  So long as the climate, soil, and hydrology conditions are met, it can achieve successive permanence with only one act of maintenance: fire.

Prairies are one of the few ecosystems hyper-attuned to dealing with regular burning.  This is likely due to generations of indigenous use of the land, burning grasses to maneuver wildlife into favorable hunting grounds.  Over this time, the plants of the prairie learned to survive season-to-season after a controlled burn.  Some plants even have seeds that only disperse after the protective shells are exposed to high heat!  It's truly fascinating what nature can do to thrive in a regularly disturbed environment.  To the point that the disturbance becomes an ally in its success.  Astounding!

The prairie is hyper attuned to the presence of fire, taking advantage of the space it makes and nutrients it unlocks while pushing out would-be invasives that can't handle the heat

A Cultural Ecoregion

This is where I'm going to start talking more based on my learning, and I'm not sure most people I talk to agree with me on this philosophy, so take this with a grain of salt.

In studying ecology, there is a name for ecosystems that don't occur naturally.  Ecosystems that only occur when humans help make it happen.  Think agricultural farmland or a suburban park.  These are categorized as Cultural Ecosystems.  It's abundantly clear that these examples are built by humans on top of a naturally occurring landscape.  Thinking on this, one of the first questions I asked after learning about prairies was, "are they a cultural ecosystem?"

Prairies are a prime example of how humans and nature can work together in a sustainable way

While I wouldn't say I was met with admonishment, the answer was more of an "it's complicated" than anything else.  In modern ecology, we generally consider the arrival of the European settlers to be the point at which nature was touched by humans.  Any human-nature interaction prior is considered to be natural.  This considers the indigenous peoples as part of the environment rather than humans acting on it.

I will not disagree that European settlers certainly brought their own onslaught of change to the environment, but humans of all nature are capable of interacting with the environment.  While we tend to consider the way indigenous folks interact with the environment to be way better than how we do in a modern era, it doesn't mean they didn't alter it from its "natural" state.  It's just what humans do.

In my eyes, I see the existence of the prairie as a key example of a cultural ecosystem.  I don't see that as a bad thing, either.  Humans need to learn how to sustainably interact with the environment, and the small regular disturbance on the forests and grasslands that gave way to the prairie may be one of those ways.  There's a lot we can learn, not only from a functional perspective, but from a human cultural perspective about how we can interact with nature, potentially altering it, but in a way that allows it to thrive.

In today's world, where we're strongly considering conservation, preservation, and restoration as the key ways to sustaining our planet, I think looking at how the prairie came to be can teach us how to treat ourselves as a partner of nature rather than its master.  Only when we embrace all of these methods, can we truly understand our home.  Prairies may offer some of the greatest insight into how we can do just that.

~ And, as always, don't forget to keep wondering ~

Sources
* Schulenberg, R., 1967. Prairie In A Post-Prairie Era. [PDF] Lisle, IL: The Morton Arboretum, pp.17-27. Available at: <https://acorn.mortonarb.org/Detail/objects/10502> [Accessed 19 April 2020].

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