Taylor Andrews- Documenter

Sara Kumar- Visual director

Ethan Hu- Researcher 

Free state prairie is a prairie restoration project created by Lawerence Free State High School and the University of Kansas. The prairie is split up into multiple plots. Each plot has a certain type of treatment applied to it. Some plots have seeded grasses, some plots have seeded grasses and forbs and some plots have seeded grasses and twice as many forbs. This prairie has been used for many years to conduct scientific research. We wanted to learn about what types of species live in plots with different treatments.. The reason we wanted to test this is because we learned that the higher biodiversity led to healthier ecosystems. So we wanted to know which type of treatment is the best for biodiversity.

Prairies are an ecosystem that is centered around resources. Through our experiment we wanted to understand what resources prairies had at the lowest trophic level. We also wanted to understand which plants did well in the prairie. We also wanted to see how the prairie fires affect which plants can live in the prairie.  Last of all since prairies are large open grasslands we wanted to see if we could find any interesting ecological relationships stemming from plants.Our procedure was to visit the plots and take pictures of any wildlife we found. We would also put down where we got the picture from. Then we would analyze what plants we had photographed. 

Works Cited

Long, Jaclyn. “Understanding Life on the Prairie through Ecological Networks.” 30 August 2021, https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2021/understanding-life-on-the-prairie-through-ecological-networks/.

“Wildland Fire in Tallgrass Prairie: Midwestern United States (U.S.” National Park Service, 9 March 2018, https://www.nps.gov/articles/wildland-fire-in-tallgrass-prairie.htm.

After we collected our data and reflected on it, we came to the conclusion that the most common flower found in the plots we examined was the grey headed cone flower that was found in every plot. The least common flower was both the aster amellus and the silphium lacinatium and both were found in only two plots. Some other flowers found were beebalm, syphiotrichum and cirsium.