Wildcat Glades A Marvel of God, Joplin MO
Wildcat Glads is a nature center located in a protected area Southwest of Joplin, Missouri. It is an ecological, a conservation and an education center that protects the last remaining globally unique chert glades, along with other natural resources of the biologically varied Spring River watershed.
Here are glades formed on almost contiguous beds of chert rock. Chert, silicon dioxide, is made up of generally interlocking crystals of quartz. It is reasonably insoluble and has weathered out of the more soluble limestone and dolomite rocks. Flint is a type of chert. The Grand Falls disposition located just a few miles downstream of Wildcat Glades includes enormous chert beds over six feet thick.
Chert glades are just discovered along Shoal Creek and its tributaries in about a 2 square mile area around Joplin. Chert glades, called after the bedrock on which they have actually formed, host a distinct assemblage of plants and living animals that might be discovered somewhere else in the world, however not ever found together as they exist in Wildcat Glades. A range of plants and animals discovered in surrounding caves, prairie-savanna, riparian corridor, and oak/hickory woodlands assemble here for an unusual suite of biological diversity that is being documented, kept track of, and secured through education and outreach to the surrounding community and region.
These globally unique chert glades are a hard place for life. Soils are slight to non-existent. The sun bakes down in the summer season. In the winter they are exposed and the shallow soils that do exist are susceptible to frost-heaving. Organisms making a living on a chert glade have to adjust. Plants discovered here such as fame flower, widow's cross sedum and Nuttall's sedum have smaller, greatly thickened leaves covered with a waxy cuticle. The waxy coating seals the fleshy leaves and permits storage of water throughout the spring for blooming and seed advancement in the summer season. The prickly pear cactus produces disk-like pads of succulent stem product that save water. Another way plants endure is to be an annual plant, sprouting from seed in the early spring and sprouting, maturing and flowering then when the moisture is available. Venus' looking glass plant is an example of this. Lichens, a symbiosis in between algae and fungis, cover many of the chert outcrops. The fruticose lichens, British soldiers (Cladonia types) and reindeer lichen (Cladina types) are two of the more easily known lichens. Living on the extensive lichen development are the lichen grasshoppers which perfectly blend right in with them.
In the spring the yellow blooms of lance-leaf coreopsis bring on a colorful display.
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