In the early 2000s, a harvest of pine trees on Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau led to a remarkable discovery
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.
Tracking down remnants to preserve native grasslands sometimes requires as much detective work as botanical knowledge. Tools the initiative’s scientists employ include old maps with clues in place names like Prairie Creek. There are also old land surveys with boundaries marked by rock piles where no large trees were available as landmarks. And they have a team of volunteers scouring more than 4,000 miles of old roadsides in search of native plants.
in Nashville he’s surveying for the city’s parks department with the goal of restoring about a third to native grasslands.Asked what type of grassland it was, Estes said there’s no name because it was never formally described in scientific literature. Like many Southern grasslands, it was lost before it could be recorded.
Much of the land the initiative hopes to restore lies in private hands. And Estes said knowing the cultural as well as botanical history helps him when talking to farmers about conservation. He can tell them a story about what once grew there, and relate that to what people lived there and where they chose to build homes, hunt and farm.
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