The new website for the Southeastern Plant Conservation Alliance website is now live. The new site has links to plant conservation resources and talks about work the partnership is doing to bridge local and national plant conservation efforts
Want to help review Piedmont Prairie indicator map?
Close-up of the draft Piedmont Prairie indicator in the Charlotte area. Dark green is known prairies, green are potentially restorable areas under powerlines, and yellow is other potential areas.
There’s a new Piedmont Prairie Indicator under development for the South Atlantic Conservation Blueprint. The Blueprint wasn’t doing a great job capturing important places for Piedmont Prairies and this indicator is seeking to change that. Sign-up is now open to join the review team. Indicator review teams have 1 – 2 online meetings (1 hr each) and provide feedback on indicators in development.
The draft indicator covers most of the the Piedmont Prairie Partnership area and goes from Alabama up to part of the Virginia Piedmont
Diverse and Threatened Grasslands Identified in the Piedmont of Northern Virginia
This is a guest post by Bert Harris from the Clifton Institute
Grassland in Prince William County, VA with Wavyleaf Aster and Gray Goldenrod. Photo by Bert Harris, Clifton Institute.
Grasslands of the northern Virginia Piedmont are little studied plant communities that are home to several declining bird and insect species. In the summer of 2020, researchers from the Clifton Institute, Virginia Tech, the Center for Urban Habitats, and Virginia Working Landscapes, studied the flora of 37 natural grasslands in five counties (Fauquier, Culpeper, Prince William, Fairfax, and Rappahannock). We did this to: (1) learn which species of plants are found in natural grasslands in the northern Virginia Piedmont, (2) identify threats and conservation solutions for these habitats, and (3) design seed mixes for use in wildflower meadow plantings and grassland restoration projects in our area.
We sampled grasslands with a 50 x 2-meter plot from May to September 2020, with the goal of sampling each site early and late in the season. We found 433 species of plants, 84% of which were native to Virginia. We found one globally rare plant (Torrey’s Mountain-mint Pycnanthemum torreyi) and three state-rare species (Stiff Goldenrod Solidago rigida, American Bluehearts Buchnera americana, and Purple Milkweed Asclepias purpurascens) in our survey sites. We also encountered two uncommon plants, Nodding Ladies’-tresses (Spiranthes ochroleuca) and White Heath Aster (Symphyotrichum ericoides), that were considered to be rare in the state until recently. We documented at least 16 new county records, in a region that has received substantial attention from botanists.
Six of our study sites were extraordinarily diverse compared to other vegetation surveys that have been done in Virginia (see table below).
The most diverse meadows were found on relatively basic, clay-hardpan soils over diabase bedrock. High-quality meadows were also found on more acidic soils over sandstone and greenstone (metabasalt). The highest quality grasslands were found in powerline clearings that are mowed annually. Constant grazing and frequent hay cutting seem to be incompatible with species rich natural grasslands in the northern Piedmont.
Unfortunately, three populations of rare plants in powerline clearings were accidentally sprayed with herbicide by power companies during our study. Several sites are also threatened by invasion of plants from Asia, Europe, and the mid-western US. Invasions of Chinese Bush-clover (Lespedeza cuneata), Spotted Knapweed (Centaurea stroebe), Joint-head Grass (Arthraxon hispidus), and Big Bluestem (Andropogon gerardii) are especially problematic. Urban development is also a serious threat in the region. The last population of Earleaf False Foxglove (Agalinis auriculata) in Virginia was in a northern Piedmont grassland that was converted to a housing development.
Figure 1. Most of the sites we sampled had high native plant diversity and low exotic species importance. Exotic species importance = (number of exotic species + total abundance of exotic plants) / 2
We at the Clifton Institute are working with power companies, government agencies, and private landowners to improve management of these special grasslands. We have also designed a seed mix to use for meadow plantings in our area so that wildflower meadow plantings can provide excellent habitat while also being beautiful and easy to establish. Many characteristic northern Piedmont grassland plants are not available from commercial seed sellers, and we are collecting seeds and distributing seeds and seedlings to the local community for restoration projects.
The Virginia Native Plant Society provided financial support for this project, and Manassas National Battlefield Park and Fairfax County Park Authority granted research permits.
Sharing information about rights-of-way management
One of the recent calls of the informal Piedmont Prairie Partnership Steering Committee focused on sharing information about how different folks were working with power companies on rights-of-way management. What’s working well? What’s not? How have you dealt with this? That kind of stuff.
We wrote down some of the info that came out of the call and thought that I might be a good idea to open up that document to the rest of you as well. Partly to share some of the info we already had but also to give you an option to share your experiences and make it more of a crowd-sourced resource.
Virginia landowner's prairie restoration story featured in Southeast Blog
In case you didn’t see it, I want to draw your attention to an excellent blog that was featured in the Southeast Grassland Initiative newsletter recently. Chris Ludwig writes about restoring a Piedmont Prairie on his land in Virginia.
New report on Piedmont Prairie mapping in NC is now available
The folks at the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program did an outstanding job looking into the impacts of soils, human alteration, and landscape context on the distribution of rare Piedmont Prairie plants. Here are a few results that stood out to me:
Rare Piedmont Prairie species mostly occur in human-altered places like powerline and roadside rights-of-way. So much of conservation focuses on “undisturbed” areas and this is a clear indication of how important altered areas are going to be in bringing back Piedmont Prairies.
A large number of occurrences weren’t associated with shrink-well or rocky soils. This supports the idea that Piedmont Prairies occurred broadly across the uplands of the Piedmont and not only on specific soils.
Overall the report underscores how intertwined people and Piedmont Prairies really are. Figuring out where many species are requires understanding the complex quilt of human influences from the Native Americans up through what we’re all doing today.
Add a prairie to the Piedmont Prairie Trail map
We’re working on a map of all publicly accessible Piedmont Prairies and we need your help. First, go to this map and see if you know of any Piedmont Prairies we missed. If so, please go to this survey to add it to the map. It’s not that fancy yet, but something simple to get things started.
You may have heard of birding trails or other types of recreational trails that put together information on multiple sites as part of a larger "trail". This map is a start toward creating a Piedmont Prairie Trail.
Piedmont prairie video an official selection of the Longleaf Film Festival
As part of an effort to spread the word beyond the usual suspects, we submitted the short version of the Piedmont Prairie video to the Longleaf Film Festival. The festival highlights short and feature-length documentary and narrative films with a connection to North Carolina. It’s run by the NC Museum of History.
The video is now an official selection of the festival. Unfortunately, it won’t be screened in person (thanks, COVID-19). That said, the festival has been spreading the word through social media, online, and will be doing a virtual screening of all the films this weekend.
Piedmont Prairie videos on track for Mid-December completion
Everything’s on track to have the short videos on Piedmont Prairies ready by mid-December. Right now it looks like the short one will be around 4 minutes and the longer one will be around 10 minutes. We’ll have them up on youtube so everyone can use them.
While you’re waiting, here are a couple of pictures from some places we visited. Overall we went to 9 different sites in NC, SC, and GA.
Rickie White (Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association) and Johnny Randall (NC Botanical Garden) at Mason Farm Biological Reserve in Chapel Hill, NC.
Filming Johnny Rickard (U.S. Forest Service) at a Smooth Coneflower restoration site near Toccoa, GA
California study shows grasslands can be better carbon sink than forests
In case you missed it, there was an interesting paper published last year showing that grasslands in California can be a more reliable carbon sink than forests. Even though forests can store more carbon, they store most of that carbon above ground and that goes right back into the atmosphere with the big wildfires they’ve been having. Grasslands store most of their carbon below ground where it’s not lost in major fires.
While under the best case scenario for limiting climate change (RCP2.6) trees in California can still store more carbon than grasslands, all other areas show grasslands being better for storing carbon. The drier the predicted conditions, the more grasslands win out.
Dass et. al 2018. California grasslands store more carbon with increasing drought. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aacb39
Some helpful numbers on power lines and prairies
As many of you know, power line rights-of-way can be an important opportunity for Piedmont Prairies. Management of these areas, when done appropriately, could help maintain or restore prairies throughout the Piedmont. How much prairie could be restored through these rights-of-way? How might this help pollinators? Here are a few rough number that might help.
There are about 840 miles of power lines in the Piedmont.
After excluding areas in rights-of-way where prairie restoration is less feasible (e.g., heavily developed areas, water, wetlands), there are around 240,000 acres in power line rights-of-way in the Piedmont.
Power line rights-of-way support 10 times the abundance of bees compared to forests
Power line rights-of-way support twice the species richness of bees compared to forests
The first two numbers come from some early analysis in mapping Piedmont prairies for the partnership. The last two come from a recent study in New England looking at the impact of power lines on bees.
The data on power line locations are available here
There will also be some good sections in the upcoming Piedmont Prairies videos talking about the importance of power line rights-of-way and their roles in climate change adaptation. We’re still planning on having the videos ready by mid-December.
Filming Piedmont Prairie video Oct 1 -3
We’ve got some great Piedmont Prairie locations lined up in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Of course, we can’t get to all the great sites but this should be a good sample. Big thanks to everyone who agreed to serve as local guides to share your stories and special places. We’re hoping to have the edited video ready for release by the end of the year. We’re also working on a few other ways to use the footage - like a story map showcasing the different prairies we visit.
Short video on Piedmont Prairies now in the works
One of the first things the partnership decided to do was create a short video on Piedmont Prairies. Something to talk about the history of prairies in the Piedmont, their recent declines, and the great work being done to bring them back through out the region. We’re working on the script and locations right now.