Prairie and pollinator restoration work and research continues along the Haines Branch Prairie Corridor slated for prairie restoration in the future by the City of Lincoln and project partners. The first field season is complete.
Goals
Objectives for this project are:1. To characterize vegetation and native bee community differences among degraded brome field, a modified pollinator restoration mix from Prairie Legacy, LLC, and a high diversity prairie mix from Prairie Plains Resource Institute;
2. To focus on characterizing the long-term plant community dynamics and trends from a restored prairie landscape owned and managed by The Nature Conservancy in south-central Nebraska.
Current Status
Data cleaning and visualizations from the first field season has been completed in order to collaborate with the City of Lincoln. The preliminary results from sampling eight restored high-diversity grasslands under patch-burn grazing management for 18 years in south-central Nebraska shows consistent periods of species richness increase and then maintenance across restorations. Diversity indexes and community dissimilarity metrics revealed overall persistence and consistency in the plant community over time, following a distinct assembly period according to community correlation matrices. These restorations exhibit consistent assembly and maintenance trends regardless of installation specifics, management, and environmental variability. This suggests that heterogeneous management across restored landscapes can facilitate diverse plant community composition that is temporally persistent and contributes to landscape resilience.
Graduate Student(s)
-Katharine Hogan, Ph.D. (January 2018 - March 2020)
Project Duration
January 2018 - August 2022
Funding
-National Science Foundation Research Traineeship (NRT)
Project Location
Statewide Nebraska
Cooperators
