We did a lot of brush thinning that first year so there is a stark difference after year one for the photos looking north. The second photo shows the black after our spring fire, and the slash from the brush mowing. The third and fourth photos seem pretty similar to the second photo. In the third and fourth photo I show a slight panoramic I took with my phone to help place the oak trees in the photo. This gives the viewer a way to anchor the photos.
Unfortunately the brush was originally so thick that you can’t see the oaks in that first image. It might have been better to move the photo point a little closer to the oaks to get them in that first photo, or perhaps clear a bit of brush. Often I will paint a stripe around a tree to help the viewer see it.
What do you think of the photos looking down? To me, they are less helpful as I can’t make out the species easily from the images. Is the herbaceous layer improving or not?
Why am I doing the photos in different months? Because grant deadlines crept up on us and those were the days we had to take photos.
The cool thing about these photo points is that we also collected the baseline vegetation data before we did any brush clearing. We recorded all species and their percent cover in each quadrat of 50 random quadrats. We will go back next year, which will be year 5, and resample for vegetation and take new photos.
The pairing of vegetation data with photos makes the photos more meaningful and vegetation data more visual.
Prescribed fire is an essential management tool in grassland systems. It can help suppress invasive species, particularly woody species, and maintain native plant diversity. Some plants and animals thrive in recently burned habitat, others prefer some thatch cover or have larval stages that overwinter in surface litter. When managing for the entire ecosystem, it is helpful to maintain a rotation of burned and unburned areas, providing opportunities for a strong diversity of species with differing fire tolerance to thrive at the landscape level. This is certainly a challenge in highly fragmented landscapes like tallgrass prairie within the midwestern United States.
Habitat fragmentation is a leading cause of declining biodiversity throughout the Midwest region. This is particularly true for reptiles like ornate box turtles. As a result of fragmentation, the ornate box turtle is a state-threatened species in Illinois, where they persist in small, isolated areas. Prescribed fire is needed to maintain the open grassland habitat the turtles prefer as well as support overall biodiversity.
Ornate box turtles spend winters belowground. As temperatures cool in the fall, turtles begin digging holes and spending nights underground. Once temperatures reach a certain level, they will stay belowground essentially sleeping through the winter. As temperatures warm in the spring, turtle metabolism ramps up and they dig out of their holes. The days and weeks when the turtles enter and emerge from their burrows are a sensitive time. Their metabolisms are running more slowly, they physiologically move and respond to their surroundings slowly. If a fast-moving grass fire moves through their habitat, they may not be able to burrow down or hide quickly enough to avoid injury, or worse, death.
Turtle tracking dogs smell turtles and pick them up. Researchers quickly accept the turtle, give the dog a pat on the head, and then return the turtle to the that spot within an hour.
To help land managers identify these sensitive turtle times, Devin Edmonds and colleagues from the Illinois Natural History Survey and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign conducted a study to determine exactly when turtles burrow in the fall and emerge in the spring. Devin attached radio-trackers to turtles in three different populations in Illinois. Observed turtle presence aboveground was correlated with air temperature, soil temperature, shell temperature, and soil inversion date to generate a predictive model land managers can use to determine conditions when turtles are most likely present aboveground.
Air temperature was the most predictive of all the environmental variables considered. In the fall, turtles can remain aboveground in cooler temperatures than in spring. Warmer air temperatures are needed in spring for turtle emergence. The best model includes both air temperature and day of year to accurately predict ornate box turtle presence aboveground in Illinois:
Fall
Spring
Date
Air Temp
Probability turtles aboveground
Date
Air Temp
Probability turtles aboveground
1 October
16° C (60° F)
10%
1 March
15° C (59°F)
10%
1 November
16° C (60° F)
6%
1 April
15° C (59°F)
20%
1 November
15° C (59°F)
<5%
1 April
10° C (50°F)
<5%
Author recommended thresholds in bolded bottom row.
Lower air temperatures further reduce the probability that turtles are aboveground. We encourage land managers to be aware of areas where ornate box turtle populations exist and prioritize prescribed fire activity in those areas during the dormant season, before temperatures trigger emergence in the spring and after turtles go under in the fall. Prescribed fire in areas without known turtle populations can be prioritized outside these recommended conditions. This paper provides the most robust recommendations to date on predicting emergence and submergence dates, giving land managers more power to achieve prescribed fire objectives for the whole ecosystem and avoid turtle injury or mortality.
We don’t have the specific dates yet, but September, 2024 looks to be the month for our GRN workshop in Franklin Grove Illinois, about two hours west of Chicago. We last hosted the GRN back in 2014. Since then we have brought back bison to parts of the preserve, and we have purchased more land and have created more prairie plantings. We have about 150 prairie plantings! We have done a lot of brush thinning, wetland creations, savanna and oak woods work. We collect a lot of seed on site and have a nice seed handling facility. We have worked very hard to keep the invasive weeds at bay. Our science program is sophisticated. Come see!
Future GRN workshops are Konza in Kansas September 10-12, 2025; Shaw Reserve in Missouri in 2026; and Kankakee Sands in Indiana in 2027
By: Julianne Mason, Restoration Program Coordinator, Forest Preserve District of Will County
Five years ago, my coworker and I put in some test plots to compare the effectiveness of spraying reed canary grass with glyphosate, a non-selective herbicide, compared to treating it with clethodim, a grass-specific herbicide. Plots were treated in the late fall, early spring, or late spring in 2016-2018. The area is a remnant sedge meadow/ wet prairie in Joliet, Illinois. In the portion of the wetland that was sprayed in the late fall and early spring, reed canary grass had been scattered to moderately heavy, but native species were still present throughout.
When we put in the test plots, we marked treated individuals with pin flags. Since that time, we have not done any invasive species treatments there. The area was burned this past spring. After the burn, we were able to find many of the pin flags and evaluate the status of the treated reed canary grass plants five years later.
To my surprise, there is still a visible difference between the plots that had been treated with clethodim during the fall, compared to the glyphosate plots. Reed canary grass in the plots had been initially sprayed on October 21, 2016. In all plots, there is less reed canary grass now than there had been in 2016. However, there is noticeably less reed canary grass in the clethodim plots than in the ones treated with glyphosate.
In addition to having less reed canary grass in general in the clethodim plots, none of the marked locations from the 2016 treatment have alive reed canary grass now. However, in the glyphosate plots, more than half of the marked locations from the 2016 treatment have alive reed canary grass now.
This is interesting because roughly half of the clethodim-treated individuals had been recorded as alive but stunted in 2017 and 2019, while the other half had been recorded as dead. In contrast, nearly all of the glyphosate-treated individuals had been recorded as dead in 2017 and 2019. This suggests that the initial glyphosate treatment killed the reed canary grass. Since it is a non-selective herbicide, it also killed the sedges and other native species in the immediate vicinity, leaving visible “holes” in the vegetation. These holes probably provided space for reed canary grass to germinate and re-establish in the sprayed locations. In contrast, since clethodim is a grass-specific herbicide, it did not affect sedges and native forbs, and those plants were able to expand into the former reed canary grass locations.
The plots that were treated in the spring of 2017 were a different story. Roughly half of the marked locations where reed canary grass had been sprayed on April 21, 2017, have live reed canary grass now. There was not a noticeable difference between the two types of herbicide used.
Based on this case study, it seems that late fall treatment of reed canary grass with clethodim herbicide is quite effective! For the fall treatments, we used 0.75% Volunteer herbicide (clethodim product), with 1.5% Powerhouse which has ammonium sulfate (AMS) incorporated in the surfactant. Of course, reed canary grass has been re-invading into the plots, but I was completely surprised that the specific locations treated with clethodim herbicide have resisted re-invasion by reed canary grass over the span of the past five years!
This makes me double-down on my conclusion in the initial article: “In many of our natural areas, and especially immediately under invasive plants, the seed bank may not be our friend. It may have seeds of more invasive plants instead of native species. Creating ‘holes’ in the vegetation with non-selective chemical use can just make space for more invasive plant recruitment: spray and repeat, spray and repeat. To break out of that cycle, an end game is to facilitate renewed dominance of the native matrix, which seems to happen better and more quickly when a grass-specific herbicide is used to treat the reed canary grass.”
To my past self – yes, I totally agree! And now I add: late fall is a great time to spray reed canary grass with clethodim herbicide.
Our area has five species in the genus Lespedeza, and two are invasive. Here is a quick summary of the five species and a link at the end to a lengthier set of images with pointers.
Lespedeza capitata, round headed bushclover. Native. Upright with modest size leaves of three that are more fuzzy with hairs.
L virginica, native, slender bush clover. Upright with slender leaves.
L leptostachya, prairie bushclover. Native and rare. Stands upright but a dainty plant with narrow leaves and small flowers.
L cuneata, sericea lespedeza, invasive. Stands tall like this, with many small leave of 3. This invasive is known to many.
L daurica, Dahurian bush clover. Invasive. The main way to know this Lespedeza is that it sprawls in the vegetation. L daurica is not known to many, but it occurs in the counties by Nachusa Grasslands. It is at McCune Sand Prairie, Mineral Marsh, and sadly Nachusa. We are pushing hard to get this plant gone but it is tough to find in a tallgrass prairie.
To make progress with weeds you need your crews, scientists, and citizens to recognize them as they are hiking about. Once we find the occurrence we can deal with it. Which is why I made a longer version of the above photos with identification pointers. You can find this on the Friends of Nachusa Grasslands website under stewardship resources:
by Izabella Redlinski, Deputy Director of Resource Management, Forest Preserves of Cook County
[Izabella was at our GRN workshop at Windom Minnesota and sent me some resource links related to topics we were discussing – BK]
Paper by R. Pizza et all – this work looked at Wisconsin prairies that were seeded with seeds sourced from various distances from their final destination – the establishment rate and abundance was not affected by distance of seed sources, but phenology might have been. The seeding rate was what also increased positive results (shocker I know!)
Bucharova et al – talks about different seed sourcing techniques – regional admixture being the favorite – this is in fact what many of the projects discussed on this conference do. Caveat – this work is from Germany and based on European grasslands and meadows.
There is a CW café that talks about this prepared by myself and a group of folks interested in the seeding with climate change in mind. More on this initiative here from the GRN blog itself!
Lastly, something we know already – the planting year conditions affect prairie restoration outcomes by Anna (Funk) Groves – which probably reinforces why we should seed prairies on multiple years
Research that supports or negates some of our practices based on experience is important, and I wish there was more of a bridge between practitioners and researchers to listen to us and address questions we have.
Much of the nation was sweltering this week and so were we in Windom Minnesota with around 70 who gathered. We had folks from the North Star State, and Illinois, Nebraska, Indiana, the Dakotas, Iowa, Wisconsin and David from Texas. We visited four good sites, two each day. There was a lot of sharing of lessons learned during the day, and during meals and in the evenings. We are passionate about our work and like to talk details.
Kudos to Jeff Zajac who was the host in chief. He had a bunch of helpers with Cathy Forstner doing logistics and Chad August, Brian Nyborg, Bill Schuna, Shon Thelen and Kent Schaap who did the on site work and most of the mapping.
Jeff Zajac (center) at the 2023 Grassland Restoration Network near Windom, Minnesota.
We talked about weed management and noted that as in real estate, the location of your preserve is important. An invasive weed in damp Illinois may be only a nuisance in mid-Nebraska. Most every one agreed that Canada thistle reduces as a prairie planting gets going. We Illinoisans were noting that the Windom Minnesota prairies had little brush whereas our prairies want to turn to shrublands.
We also discussed seeds, purchasing vs harvesting seed ourselves. Prescribed fire operations, fire frequency, smoke issues, and seasonal timing. Minnesota has their awesome sales tax that fills the Outdoor Heritage Fund. Good stuff.
Flail vac seed harvester w pendulum broadcaster behind
This GRN blog site is a welcome venue to share your lessons learned. Click on the “Follow the GRN” for our weekly emails of lessons learned. Each blog post has search tags added. One tag is the author of the article and another is the topic. So people searching will find your good works. Just email Bill your ideas at bkleiman@ tnc.org.
Jeff Zajac closed by encouraging us to do our best conservation. That the next generation will take forward what we learn now and what we do now, just as we carry forward the good works from the generation before us.
We want some of our prairies free of shrubs for various birds and other wildlife that want prairie without shrubs everywhere. We will end up with lots of shrublands in the future as there is a lot of seed source of shrubs around in our modern landscape. For now, we can push back some shrubs to have open grasslands in places at Nachusa Grasslands. For example, Amorpha bush, Amorpha fruticosa has been shown to be aggressive here. For now, we don’t add it to our mixes. This shrub took over a chunk of the Thelma Carpenter Prairie SW planting #59. Crazy thick. That is not a prairie but a shrubland on top of the some of the highest ground in Ogle County! This shrub is “supposed” to grow along creeks. I know we want some shrubs here and there. Generally, we would love to see more hazelnut thickets, some American plum groves. But some shrubs can take over. Like smooth sumac and wafer ash, which we don’t plant as they are abundant with no help from us.
Amorpha bush in a new prairie planting. Sparse in this photo but imagine ten thousand of these in this planting.
SEED MIX PROPORTIONS:
As volunteer steward master planter Jay Stacy says, getting the proportions right in the seed mixes is a challenge. I have not been as finicky as Jay but I agree that some species can be overdone. We tend to want to plant a lot of seed and a lot of diversity per acre, which is generally good. But several species can come on abundantly.
Examples:
Big bluestem and Sorghastrum nutans. Good to have a bit, but not too much. We do need graminoids in the seed mixes. Some of our plantings look like flower gardens with few grasses. But we now add a lot more northern dropseed thanks to our one acre dropseed garden. We add lots of little bluestem, side oats grama, Kalm’s brome, the little Panicums and other less common grasses.
Black eyed susan can be too abundant: Don’t throw in a ton of a species to get the weights up. For instance, see MRCP Hill Planting #134. On its second year it looks like black eyed susan is all we planted. They planted 37 pounds of Rudbeckia hirta on 18 acres, so about 2 pounds per acre. Looks like a quarter of that would have been enough. I would like to think the thick cover of this one species will not inhibit the other native seeds, but who knows?
Yellow coneflower, Rattibida pinnata: It seems that every seed planted of yellow coneflower will establish, so go light on this one. I remember the planting along Stonebarn Road of HLP, on the west third. The yellow coneflower was crazy thick for at least several years. Then it tamed down and now seems normal. Have a look.
Bee balm, Monarda fistulosa: Similar to yellow coneflower.
Showy tick trefoil, Desmodium canadense: This becomes very abundant and all those seeds stick to your clothing making you avoid the area and likely avoid caring for the area. I would not add this to your mixes. I don’t find Illinois tick trefoil becoming abundant.
Canada milkvetch, Astragalus canadensis: This was not on the property before a nursery purchase long ago at Nachusa. I hesitate to add a species that was not here. But we have done it with this and that, and have been burned a few times with invasive plants sold to us instead of what we ordered. https://grasslandrestorationnetwork.org/2021/09/09/beware-what-seed-you-buy/
I think prairie dock was not here on our remnants. Back then, in an early planting they rationalized adding dock as almost all of our mesic soils were plowed up long ago. This makes sense to me, but beware as seeds are powerful.
One of 3 seed planters we use
EQUIPMENT:
Add more seed when the pull behind seed hoppers is about half full. Due to chaff and stems. We have planting 135 where I see several “empty” lines in this planting, which is on its second year. A crew member may have been pulling a seeder behind their truck that was not planting much seed. The seed mixes have lots of chaff and chopped stems. If you open the seed hopper and see a quarter full hopper, you may think you have a quarter of the seed left. Nope, that is just stems and chaff rotating about in there. The seed fell out already.
Or perhaps the empty strips were the crew being too casual on their driving paths and simply missed sections. We often use an orange cone or two to help mark the driving path. We move the cones on each pass to see where we left off. We sometimes have a person on foot who moves the orange cones to help keep the seeders going in straight lines.
Don’t run out of seed. We tend to seed a field twice. First time we go say east west. Second seeding done right after this in north south. This helps eliminate missed spots. If a field needs say 10 barrels of seed, save about half of those barrels for the second round of seeding. We have seen people put all their seed in hoppers and run out before they got half of the first seeding done.
Seeder openings. Similar to above, don’t run the seeder openings on the bottom of a seeder at full open. You may plant the seed too fast and run out early. Start with modest openings and watch and adjust. Spray label glue on a piece of 8 by 11 inch paper and place the sticky paper sheet in front of where you are seeding and then look at the sheet. You will see the seeds on the paper that are impossible to see on the soil. Seeding the snow is nice because you can see the seed on the snow.
Filling the seed hoppers
Don’t reverse with pull behind seeders. They jack-knife very easily and will dent the vehicle you are using. Get a spotter. Or take it off the hitch and turn it manually.
Grease seeders every day.
Keep hopper lids secure and not bouncing open as you bounce over the field. The hinges will break.
Don’t be too fussy about where one mix starts and another ends, say the dry mix vs the dry mesic mix. Those boundaries are hard to define. Ponder your soils, put some flags out and go for it.
Bring a portable air tank with you as tires can go flat.
Seeders: Don’t drive fast, like on a road, with the mixer paddles engaged to the wheels. You may damage seeder. Go slow. Go easy. Or trailer it to the site.
We use an enclosed livestock trailer to haul big loads of seed to keep them dry and not seeding the roadsides.
Rye buffer or no: I like to seed right up to the right of way. Sometimes we seed ten yards of Canada rye buffer with the mix. The rye perhaps keep the right-of-way grass from moving in quickly. I don’t know if this works but likely it does not hurt, but put the diverse seed mix to the ROW edge.
Back in 2005 we used these air seeders
For a few years we used contracted “air seeders” that blew seed onto the ground. We concluded that we like to keep our seed on our site. The contractors wanted the seed mix delivered to their shop, and their conveyor to fill the seeder was dropping our precious seed on their shop floor into a kind of pit. It is too hard to get that seed to see any wasted. When seeding with this machine we had a clog a few times from our stems and chaff and it was hard to know where it missed seeding the field.
FIELD PREP
We tend to mow corn stubble to make driving over it easy. We used to burn the corn stubble but we seem to get good establishment without burning. Maybe the corn stubble helps retain moisture in dry summer days for those seedlings. Maybe the stubble helps keep rain from washing our seeds to the bottom of the hill.
We tend to glyphosate waterways at least once to help our seed establish in the waterways.
We tend to disable field drainage tiles and bulldoze weird fencerows or overly sculped waterways before planting.
If you are trying to turn a low diversity cool season grass pasture into high diversity prairie should you just seed the recently prescribed burnt sod? Or first apply glyphosate herbicide or grass herbicide, then burn it, then seed it?
This long term experiment tests this. Here are our year two thoughts.
Above is the “before” photo of the pasture. Almost all simply cool season grass sod and a few weeds.
Fall 2021, October 15 and 18, we sprayed one plot with clethodim grass herbicide, one with glyphosate, and the third we left alone. We only did one application of herbicide.
All three plots were then burned November 11, 2021.
Next, the plots were all seeded by Bernie Buchholz. The first seeding was a few weeks after the prescribed fire of the plots. This was with about 27 pounds per acre of seed from 117 species. Then in April another 27 pounds per acre of 55 species was over-seeded. So 54 pounds of seed per acre were planted before the first growing season. This is a lot.
May 22, 2022: Above is First spring of the “control” plot where we did not apply either herbicide.
May 22, 2022: Above is clethodim pasture looking about the same as the control with the grasses looking weaker and maybe some weedy forbs coming up.
May 22, 2022: Above is the glyphosate pasture looking very similar to the clethodim with the grasses looking weaker and maybe some weedy forbs coming up.
October 10, 2022: Above, by fall of the next year, so one growing season, is the control plot where we did not spray the pasture, but only seeded it. On the left you can see the glyphosate plot.
October 10, 2022: Above is the clethodim grass herbicide plot looking wild and weedy after one season. It looks very different from the control. The seedlings would be an inch or two tall and very hard to find in there.
October 10, 2022: Above is the glyphosate herbicide plot also looking wild and weedy after one season.
July, 2023: Above, on left is unsprayed but seeded control, and on right is clethodim grass herbicide treated and seeded. With Bernie Buchholz doing some weeding. On right grass is less dense and there are more weedy forbs, but what was seeded are mostly seedlings.
July, 2023: Above, no spray but seeded on left, glyphosate and seeded on right.
July, 2023: Above, Bernie Buchholz finding small seedlings of his planted species in the second year of the restoration in among the tall weeds.
Here are Bernie’s thoughts about what he is seeing on year two of this long term study:
“Now in the second growing season, both herbicide treated areas have dramatically more stems of native species, easily 20 times more. And the volume of the biomass in treated areas is significantly higher than untreated areas.
The glysophate treated area seems to have the greatest number of native species, including more little bluestem.
It’s hard to imagine the untreated area catching up to the treated areas over the coming years, but that’s what we are trying to learn.
The only significant non-native (or some would say low value native) species in the treated areas is the thousands of yarrow. One of the major downside risks to treating a pasture planting with herbicide is the potential to release difficult species like white and yellow sweet clover. Our favorable results are our good fortune. Had we released otherwise dormant weed species, the untreated areas might have seemed more favorable and certainly would require less management.”
Poison hemlock, Conium maculatum. The maculatum means spotted and the stem has conspicious red spots. Hemlock is a modestly invasive plant that can form thickets if it gets started in disturbed or fallow ground. I sometimes see it along some local creeks where flooding may kill the sod and leave open spaces. Or recently shaded areas that are opened up can sometimes have a flush of hemlock that had been suppressed somewhat by shade. Hemlock is highly poisonous. A member of the carrot family. These are biennial plants so the best time to spray them is the year one basil leaves or in the spring of year two before it bolts.
image of basal leaves from Washington state
On May 26, 2023, we tested a 2% solution of Garlon 3A in water, with methylated seed oil at a half ounce per gallon on hemlock plants that had already started to bolt their flower stalk. The plant can be 4 to 7 feet tall. The plants we sprayed were just starting to bolt. We wondered if the Garlon 3A would kill them.
Below, looking down, is one of dozens of hemlock about a week after being foliar sprayed. The plant is drooped, including the flower stalk. But is the root going to die?
Below, about four weeks after being sprayed. We flagged several plants to make sure we were looking at the right plants.
Below is after six weeks. I also applied a bit of blue tree marking paint so as to keep track of this plant. As you can see it looks dead. I think the root is dead, but I will have to wait until next spring to find out. I conclude 2% Garlon 3A controls hemlock.
Hemlock can become huge, especially if a second year plant re-sprouts after mowing, it can come back a third year and be huge like this one below. Hemlock can be spaded out, like wild parsnip. You don’t need or want to touch the plant to spade it. You don’t need to get all the root, just “cut the carrot” root and it will die. Step on the plant to knock it down so you know it was stabbed.
Various other herbicides will also control hemlock.
We sometimes mow hemlock or wild parsnip when they are tall and late in flower. This seems to set them back, but we have not tracked individuals. At least they don’t make seed that year.
I asked a few colleagues for what works for them:
From Julianne Mason: We have primarily used Transline 0.5% on poison hemlock, and also some treatments using triclopyr 3A 3% or Vastlan 2.5%. All those herbicides seem to work well in the spring, before the plants bolt and flower.
We have done a couple of instances of base clipping the hemlock at late flower, primarily in areas of widely scattered hemlock not dense patches. The hemlock hasn’t seemed to come back in those locations the following year, but we haven’t tracked or documented it too closely. Haven’t tried mowing bigger patches at late flower.
Josh Clark uses Garlon 3A on hemlock and dames rocket.
From Bryon Walters: Below wilted hemlock Bryon sprayed with Buckshot, a mix of glyphosate and 2-4-D on a ruderal edge. He was able to spray some reed canary grass at the same time. He likes to spray before the plant bolts. But if bolted he mentions that 3% Garlon 4 should work. The G4 mix also works at the same time for mullein (Verbascum thapsus), and some woodies that are leaved out early in the year.
May 16, 2024: I tested 2% Garlon 3A with MSO added. I sprayed the hemlocks April 6 and about 5 weeks later they were dead and wilted to nothing as in below photo. The blue paint in on a dead hemlock.
grassland restoration network 