Biologists are seeking to save the last remnants of grasslands that once sprawled across the American Southeast. The Southeastern Grasslands Initiative is working to restore thousands of acres of grasslands, develop a seed bank and discover new species.
that once stretched more than 140,000 square miles from Virginia to Texas can properly be considered a grassland although its dominant visual feature is a tree.Famed naturalist E.O. Wilson has written that the southern grassland biome is “probably the richest terrestrial biome in all of North America.” It is also one of the most highly endangered. With habitat loss, many animals have all but disappeared from the landscape, including the monarch butterfly, Eastern meadowlark and Bobwhite quail.
Initiative co-founder Dwayne Estes is a botany and ecology professor at Austin Peay State University, where it’s based. He recently paid a visit toin Nashville he’s surveying for the city’s parks department with the goal of restoring about a third to native grasslands. “Nearly every single thing around us has changed,” he said. But he pointed to a few sun-loving native plants such as MacGregor’s wild rye and a gnarled chinkapin oak, saying they offer clues about the land hundreds of years ago.
Among the private landowners wooed are former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican, and his wife Tracy, who own a 900-acre farm in New Castle, Virginia. Tracy Frist raiseson the abundant native grasses. A Virginia Tech graduate student is studying the grasses’ nutritional value and its effect on the cattle and the meat they yield. Tracy Frist said. And Estes is helping the Frists understand how to best manage their land through grazing and controlled fire.
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