Prairie Botanist

This links to a video introducing the Mukwonago River Oak Barrens, a new project of the Glacial Prairie Chapter of The Prairie Enthusiasts. It discusses the setting, ecological significance, early stewardship, and plans for the future. https://youtu.be/iYZmadm-rug

Find this article (and lots of other good stuff) in the spring edition of the Prairie Promoter.

See the recent open access article by Tulowieki, Hanberry, and Abrams linked here. It offers insights, I think, into how we might assess vulnerability of northeastern and upper midwestern oak ecosystems to climate change and into the human relationships needed to sustain them.

“The results revealed a consistently and often significantly greater abundance of fireadapted (mainly oak) taxa near Indigenous settlements (Tables S1–S3). The relative abundances near Indigenous settlements were high for the last five millennia (Figure 3) for oak
(median 74–82% from pollen-based reconstructions) and combined pyrophilic (median
86–91%), supporting the notion that Indigenous burning maintained fire-tolerant taxa
through climatic changes that would have otherwise benefitted taxa adapted to cooler
and/or moister climates [11,85]. These results occurred using different representations
of Indigenous settlements, using pollen-based and land survey record-based estimates of
relative abundance, analysing at two different resolutions (8 km and 24 km), and analysing
various timesteps. Abundances of fire-tolerant vegetation showed greater consistency
over time where Indigenous settlements existed and with greater fluctuations elsewhere
(Figure 3), suggesting that the sustained presence of Indigenous settlements over millennia
stabilised oak-dominated forests. For example, during the regional cooling of the Little Ice
Age circa 13th–19th centuries, pyrophilic abundance was still 86–90% in the cells with archaeological sites, versus 66–70% in the cells without. Abundance decreased from previous
timesteps in cells without archaeological sites during this time (Figure 3). Indeed, the results
show a slight decreasing trend in pyrophilic and oak abundance throughout the region
where there were no archaeological sites, perhaps suggesting post-glacial infilling of more
mesic species away from Indigenous settlement. The drop in pyrophilic abundance from
1495 to 1745 CE may manifest the effects of an Indigenous depopulation and reductions in
cultural burning (Figures 2 and 3).”