INature: academia

I suppose 16+ months of my life can be boiled down to 189 words, and a couple pictures...

Many tallgrass prairie restorations fail to match the level of biodiversity found in undisturbed prairie remnants. Restorations often become excessively dominated by warm-season C₄ grasses at the expense of forbs due to the lack of historical disturbance regimes. Interseeding new species usually requires a disturbance mechanism to aid establishment of new plants. We interseeded five native prairie species into a grass dominated restoration in April 2013. Two types of treatments were used in a factorial design: biomass removal by haying or burning, and application of a grass-specific herbicide. After one growing season, seedling counts of sown species and regional natives were higher in plots treated with herbicide. Seedlings of the most abundant sown species, Parthenium integrifolium, were taller in plots treated with herbicide. Aboveground biomass of warm-season grasses was greatly reduced by herbicide, reduced even further by a second application, and was found to be negatively correlated with the height of P. integrifolium seedlings. Haying increased seedling counts for regional natives, but otherwise was no different than burning. Where management options are limited, grass-specific herbicide application could constitute an effective tool for prairie restorationists interested in increasing floral diversity.