Photo Credit: Curtis Prairie, University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum

Here’s a tricky thing about restoring the environment – you have to keep at it.

Perhaps nowhere is that lesson more clear than at Curtis Prairie, the world’s oldest prairie restoration.

Situated in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum, Curtis Prairie is widely known as the birthplace of ecological restoration. 

What researchers, students and volunteers learn today as they strive to maintain the resurgent prairie may prove as helpful to ongoing environmental restoration as discoveries made back in the Thirties.

Today, it’s easy to imagine you’re wandering through an original, pre-settlement tall grass prairie as you explore the 71-acre site, which is just a part of the 1,260-acre University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.

But 70 years ago it was a run-down horse pasture.  And 100 years before that, most of the area had been plowed.

The return of native grasses, sedges, flowering plants and more is due to decades of hard work.  The University of Wisconsin purchased the property in 1933 and Botany Professor Norman Fassett suggested re-establishing a prairie there.  Fassett and his student, John Thomson, began experimenting with re-introducing native plants to the area, and were eventually joined by Aldo Leopold, William Longenecker, John Curtis (who the prairie was named after), around 200 men from the Civilian Conservation Corps and hundreds of students, volunteers and professors over the years.

Molly Fifield Murray, outreach coordinator for the Arboretum, said early restoration activities included trying to reintroduce native plant species by planting, moving sod and spreading seeds, “All the things people still do.”

But working with the old pasture was difficult, and this was before the days of herbicides.  Based on their knowledge of how prairies evolved, researchers tried using controlled burns before seeding.

This practice has since spread like, well – prairie fire.  It not only clears out non-native and invasive species, it creates the conditions prairie plants have grown to love, and their increased flowering shows it.

But even with blooming compass plants, prairie phlox and more, the future isn’t all rosy for Curtis Prairie.  Gray dogwood, sumac and aspen are among the woody plants which have adapted to prairie burns and now complicate the timing of prairie maintenance, Fifield Murray said.

Yet a potentially greater challenge for the restoration is no bigger than a raindrop, or several raindrops.

Stormwater runoff from the surrounding urban environment is a serious problem for Curtis Prairie, ushering in pollutants like oil and trash, excess sediment and nutrients and invasive species.

Researchers are currently trying to understand what makes reed canary grass so hardy, and their studies will help people everywhere deal with invasive species.

With several sedimentation ponds due for major makeovers, Fifield Murray said they’re also trying to improve efforts to keep runoff out of Curtis Prairie.  Potential solutions include improved waste catchments, plant filtering and encouraging area landowners to install rain gardens.

“We’re interested in re-creating a more natural flow,” she said.

Building a better mousetrap for stormwater detention just might turn out to be as important an environmental innovation as the prairie burn.

Resources
Mark Wegener, Paul Zedler, Brad Herrick and Joy Zedler. (2008). Arboretum Leaflets: Restoration, Discovery, Research.  Curtis Prairie: 75-year-old Restoration Research Site. August, 2008. Retrieved April 9, 2010 from the Arboretum Leaflets Web site; http://www.botany.wisc.edu/zedler/images/Leaflet_16.pdf Prairie Plains Institute staff. (ND). Retrieved April 9, 2010 from the Prairie Plains Institute site; http://www.prairieplains.org/restoration