Flying over our country's mid-section provides a bird's eye view of how we newcomers have reshaped this land in just a few centuries. Looking down, we can see squares and rectangles outlining divided land uses with waterways and forests occasionally breaking up the symmetrical grid.
Once upon a time, before plows, tractors, roads, and towns, Middle America was covered in vast grasslands reaching from Texas into Canada. The self-image Arkansawyers have of their state does not usually include a sea of undulating grass. We think more of oak-covered hills, rich river deltas and southern pine forests as Arkansas characteristics, but there are also remnants of prairie here. The tall grasses that define what is almost a secret kind of landform are tucked onto tiny preserved spaces. Fortunately a little of this native grass gene pool is still left in our Ozark Highlands, which stretch over 5.1 million acres from southern Missouri across Northwest Arkansas and into eastern Oklahoma.
Big bluestem, which can reach 8 feet, Indian grass and switchgrass following at around 6 feet, and little bluestem at 3 to 4 feet, are the most prevalent grasses on these remnant sites. They flower in early fall and have made their seeds by early November. That's when prairie restoration specialists harvest what they hope will become another generation of native plants.
Ozark Ecological Restoration Inc. is an education-based non-profit company founded in 1998 by Joe Woolbright. Its mission is land stewardship and restoration of unique Ozark natural plant communities to pre-settlement conditions, primarily tallgrass prairie sites. Woolbright says once there were approximately 66,000 acres of this prairie in Benton and Washington counties in 1831-1837 as recorded in the General Land Office survey. Now there is only about 0.5% left in these two counties.
In the conversion of native grasses to ones that can tolerate year-round grazing by cattle, there have been trade-offs in soil chemistry and ecosystem diversity for all the creatures up the food chain from microbes to bison. Soil scientists are studying how these changes have affected the physical, chemical and biological soil, and ecologists try to track down what plants and animals have adapted or died out on these prairies of change.
Woolbright estimates that some tallgrass sites have 400 plant species now compared to 700-800 species before agricultural impacts altered the variety. Woolsey Wet Prairie, next to Fayetteville's West Side Wastewater Treatment Plant, has been undergoing restoration since 2008, increasing the plant list there from 80 to over 400 species. And over 400 species of birds have been recorded on the Chesney Prairie Natural Area near Siloam Springs. Restoration of its 82 acres began in 2000.
The 30-acre Baker Prairie Natural Area within the city limits of Harrison is adjacent to a 40-acre tract owned by the Nature Conservancy. These 70 acres were once part of a 5,000-acre tallgrass prairie in Boone County and are filled with wildflowers from April to June. The Cherokee Prairie Natural Area near Charleston is also known for wildflowers, and Searles Prairie on Dixieland Road and Highway 62 in Rogers is a 12.5-acre remnant of a 10,000-acre tallgrass prairie.
Understanding the impact of climate change on this country's vast grasslands is vital. While trees sequester carbon out of the atmosphere in their wood and foliage and forests need to be expanded worldwide, trees are also subject to burning, which releases their carbon. Grass sequesters carbon in its roots and keeps it underground, even after burn-over cycles that are common on prairies.
As researchers and climate scientists search for emission-trapping strategies, rangelands as carbon sinks are gaining a whole new respect. Some cap-and-trade carbon offset programs, similar to California's programs for forests, would pay landowners to leave grasslands, which store carbon, undisturbed.
Improving grasslands with native plants that evolved and adapted over times of drought and wildfires might increase soil health and offset carbon in the process, unless a warmer/wetter climate changes the biology across the plains.
Those seeds harvested from the small pieces of prairie land where the native plants still live are tiny libraries of knowledge. They are hard-wired for regeneration of ecosystems that were here a lot longer than we have been, and undoubtedly know more about adaptation to climate than we do. It took Mother Nature thousands of years to come up with the recipe that produced the tallgrass ecosystem. It might serve us well to pay attention to the ingredients.