Management Methods

If you have ever stood at the edge of a newly planted prairie and thought, “This doesn’t look like much,” you’re not alone. I have heard it from landowners, neighbors and volunteers – and I’ve said it myself. The first year or two after a prairie planting can feel anticlimactic, even discouraging. Photos and seed mixes promise color, movement and diversity. What shows up instead often looks uneven, weedy or unfinished.

A few years back I wrote about the potential of old pastures and mature old fields dominated by cool season grass, many of which still support important populations of native prairie and savanna species. This is often very good reason on its own to forego broadcast spray of broad-spectrum herbicide, cultivation or other start-from-scratch techniques to re-establish prairie or savanna in those contexts. Another reason is that the alternative—treating a nonnative, cool-season-dominated sod as though it were prairie or savanna by restoring fire and facilitating dispersal of appropriate plant species back—can be wildly successful. The best examples of this that I know are the restoration of savanna pasture Sugar River Savanna and prairie plantings into mature smooth brome (Bromus inermis) Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) plantings at the Mounds View Grassland. While these successes are visually obvious to visitors of those sites, data is needed to help us communicate success and advocate for the associated methods.

Should you plant plugs? Learn about considerations like type of plants, scale of project and more.

A collaboration of nearly a decade is providing pivotal information about how snow cover and management approaches affect the prairie.

A review of bison at Nachusa Grasslands and how it relates to the prairie’s C value.

Prescribed fire can function as a stabilizer or a destructive disturbance depending on we use it.

What can the changing of the seasons mean for your land restoration work? Find out how the changing of the seasons affects various land stewardship practices.

Land stewardship is a year-round practice. Learn when to do things like root severing, prescribed burning, brush cutting, seed collecting and more.

Ever wondered how to manage invasive buckthorn without the use of herbicide? Our Coulee Region Chapter helped complete a study. Read here to see the results!

Controlling Clonal Tree Species By Double-Cutting By Jim Rogala Continuing on the theme of herbicide-free control methods, I’ll talk about my experience with double-cutting. Again we look to the anatomy and physiology of the species to be controlled to understand how...

Controlling Biennial Invasives Without Herbicide Using A Parsnip Predator By Jim RogalaMy recent blog post on girdling got me thinking about other herbicide-free invasive species control methods. For biennials, there are three common mechanical control methods:...

If you have an old field that you would like to plant to prairie or a stand of oak you would like to restore, don’t rush into it. Understand the history of the land and take time to observe and learn whether anything important remains. Very often degraded lands still harbor irreplaceable elements of biodiversity, and these have their own stories to tell about what a place was and could be. The tools we use in restoration can encourage these elements or extinguish them. By recognizing and preserving remnant populations of native species and their genes, we can counteract biotic…

This article was a collaboration with Jeb Barzen.  Interested in pitching in to save our fire-dependent ecosystems? The Prairie Enthusiasts’ next prescribed burn crew training will be an online-only class on Wednesday, February 12, 2025 (the first day of our annual...