By admin 
When Mike Moddrell bought 320 acres of land in southwestern Douglas County in 2002, it looked very different from the tallgrass prairie it is today.
“When I bought it, it had been neglected for a long time,” Moddrell said. “It was in pretty bad shape. I kept burning and burning and burning, and the native grass is responding to the fire. It took 20 years for the native grasses to come back.”
Today, the land boasts an abundance of native grasses and wildflowers that would otherwise have gone extinct under the relentless onslaught of invasive and woody species such as eastern red cedar, Callery pear and Chinese woodland clover. The most important aspect of Moddrell’s management is fire: he sets the prairie on fire every year in late winter. The dried brush from the previous season provides abundant fuel to keep woody species in check.
“If you have a good hot fire, they will die,” he said. “They are harder to kill with a chemical than with a match.”
Moddrell’s approach is nothing new. People have been burning grasslands for thousands of years.
Kansas’ native grasslands emerged about 12,000 years ago, after the last ice age. As the glaciers retreated and indigenous people populated North America, the grasslands evolved along with their stewards. The wide-open prairie was once one of the most diverse habitats on earth, teeming with birds, insects, bison and wildflowers.
“Prairies were created in large part by humans,” said Chris Helzer, director of science and stewardship at the Nature Conservancy of Nebraska, which restores and maintains the prairie. “The use of fire was a big part of that. Indigenous people moved plants across the landscape, they managed animal populations through hunting, and they influenced in very powerful ways the way all of those things work together. And it was intentional, it was not an accidental thing.”
The story of the developing prairie changed dramatically less than 200 years ago, after European settlers arrived. Large areas of fertile land were converted to agricultural land, at the expense of ecological diversity. Areas of never-tilled prairie, such as Moddrell’s, are often found on rocky soils unsuitable for crops. Instead, the land is used for cattle ranching and hay farming.
Besides fire, Moddrell has no choice but to use herbicides to control noxious, non-native species such as Chinese wood clover and old-fashioned bluestem. Although these herbicides reduce wildflower diversity, they are an unfortunate necessity.
“Some people are anti-chemical,” says Moddrell, “but without chemicals you would lose everything.”
Ecologists and conservationists have come to realize that the work of people like Moddrell is essential to preserving what remains of the tallgrass prairie, in a region that has lost more than 96% of its original habitat.
Two researchers from the Kansas Biological Survey and the Center for Ecological Research at the University of Kansas, Jennifer Moody and Jennifer Delisle, recently an ambitious project to catalog the unplowed tallgrass prairies that remain in Douglas County in the form of working lands like Moddrell’s: pastures and hayfields.
“There is a lot of ecological value, as well as cultural and economic value, in these open grasslands and there are many reasons to maintain them as open grasslands,” says Moody, a plant ecologist and botanist.
To find these parcels, Delisle and Moody used satellite imagery to identify promising areas and then drove more than 600 miles through Douglas County to assess land from the road. They then contacted private landowners and conducted site visits. In total, they visited 16 different plots and identified 13 as native prairie meadows or hay meadows, most of which were between 30 and 70 hectares in size. They found that more than 80% of the plants were native and more than 80% were perennial. Most of the work will be completed in 2023.
The project was funded by a $38,731 grant from the Douglas County Heritage Conservation Council, whose goals support natural and cultural heritage projects throughout the county, said Kaitlyn Ammerlaan, director of the council.
“The purpose of this particular project,” Moody said, “was to provide information to the province about where these large, native grasslands are being grazed that they might want to think about as they move forward with the open space program. think about keeping them.
“I think this research was super interesting,” Ammerlaan said, “because we understand and know about the super-diverse remnant prairie, but there was a knowledge gap in the working lands.”
The county will use the information collected as an educational tool for landowners and for zoning and planning purposes, she said.
“It’s another tool,” Ammerlaan said. “A missing piece of information that we didn’t have before.”
Moody said the landowners they spoke to understood the ecological value of the land they manage and the importance of what they do.
“It was really fun talking to these landowners,” Moody said. “Everyone we spoke to has a great understanding and a lot of pride and care for the native grasslands they manage, which was really cool to see.”