The Free State prairie was grown on an old football field, the prairie is a rich ecosystem with many organisms. The prairie is dominated by tall grasses and “warm plants” which grow during the warmest seasons of the year. Before the arrival of Indo-Europeans, fire shaped the growth of prairie organisms, the plants and grasses would survive due to having roots deep into the earth protected by layers of dirt and earth. Diverse vegetation provides food for all animals, and insects pollinate the prairie wildflowers.

Our procedure was digging up six cups of 1 ½ cups of dirt from plots 13, 14, 8, 9, 3, and 4. We used a nitrogen tester to see how much nitrogen was in our dirt nutrients. We chose this experiment because we were interested in nutrients, and the difference in dirt between only grass plots and grasses and forbs plots. Our project didn't have much to do with food chains or direct relationships in ecosystems but what we do know is the grass and plants that are grown from our dirt, are consumed by many organisms that live in the prairie. Some abiotic factors discussed in our project were the dirt we pulled from the ground, but the dirt we used is made into biotic factors like the grass and forbs grown in the plots we took samples from.