Prairie: A Natural History of the Heart of North America – Candace Savage

Thoughts: Really enjoyed reading this one. Prairie provides an overview of the range of prairie and grassland ecosystems in North America, with plenty of details about what unites them and how they vary and the ecology and interactions that go on within them.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering.)

Savage, Candace. 2020. Prairie: A Natural History of the Heart of North America (Revised Edition). Greystone Books.

• 195-198: The interaction between dams and cottonwood trees is an example of how a change in an ecosystem can have effects that are complex hard to predict. Cottonwoods seeds/seedlings require bare soil, full sun and lots of moisture to grow. In small river basins, these conditions used to be created by floods, which would scour riverbanks. The addition of dams to small rivers is thus preventing new cottonwoods from becoming established. But, in larger, braided rivers that often shift from one channel to another, the braiding creates conditions for cottonwood germination, and floods in these larger rivers used more often to sweep away new trees. Dams in large rivers, then, have had the effect of allowing cottonwood trees to grow in river channels they previously couldn’t. So, damming a river can have the effect of encouraging new cottonwood growth, or preventing new cottonwood growth, depending on the size of the waterway.
• 259-260: In the late 1980s, in an effort to cut down on cutting/mowing/spraying costs, the Iowa Department of Transportation began planting native grass and wildflower species in the margins of the state’s roads. This initiative has been a resounding success, creating more than 50,000 acres of prairie-ish ecosystem, saving money for the DoT, and boosting butterfly populations and species diversity.
  • 260: “This success has inspired the Iowa Transportation Commission to pump millions of dollars into the Living Roadway Trust fund.”