The Lawrence Free State High School prairie is set up in rows. It will start in the right bottom South corner, and make its way down the line and get to the other side and start at the North middle side and make its way back down and the same thing for the third row. Each row has 6 plots. The first row has 1-6, row 2 has 7-12 and row 3 has plots 13-18. The prairie was first made to be farmland. But in 1997 was made into a playing field (mainly football). In 2013 one of the creators and teacher Dr.Helen’s class wanted to do more hands-on activities in biology so Helen made it an assignment to make a plan of making the prairie. They made great project plans but the semester ended and the plans weren’t detailed enough yet. Over the summer Dr.Helen wanted this to still work/happen so Helen and a professor at KU Dr.Alexander had many experiments with many scientists and ended up creating the prairie slowly through the summer and the school year. They grew the plants/grass and mowed in between the plots they were creating to make 18 different plots in the prairie. This prairie was a community project not just a teacher or student project. Today, November 1st 2022 the prairie is used for information about our school and different living organisms we have access to. 

    Ecology is the study of living things. Towards the beginning of the year we got assigned trees and we got to look at them, along with seeing the bark and the leaves. All of the trees are living. Then we moved on to going to the prairie and looking at the different living plants. We took the time to learn about different trophic pyramids. The bottom part of the trophic pyramid is the producer which is soil moisture. If you have less grass you're gonna have less consumers and the more grass you're gonna have more consumers. With the prairie having a lot of grass there are more consumers which leads to the fact that soil moisture is high.

Our group was given the project of creating a question about the prairie and answering it through an experiment. We asked the question “Does a certain plot affect the moisture of the soil?”. We did a series of experiments through the 3 days we had on the prairie. The first day we did experiments on plots 1,2,7,8,13,14. Day 2 was a long but short experiment day. Day 2 was only about finding a nice spot outside of the plots so we could collect the moisture level outside of the plots. The data from day 2 was 19.1 so we wanted to do a second data collection on day 3 to see if the numbers would look closer to the number 19.1. Day 3 came around. We knew it was the last day so we needed to wrap everything up. Day 3 our numbers were either close to 19.1 or way over 19.1. Our numbers varied depending on the day.