Events

Understanding plant community responses to disturbance is necessary to improve the predictability of restoration outcomes. Although fires in tallgrass prairies historically occurred throughout the growing season, prescribed fires are often conducted in either spring or fall. These seasonal burns remove living plant material and leaf litter at different times of year, which can have different effects on how plants respond to disturbance. Because tallgrass prairie species are long-lived perennials, it can take years to see how management affects the plant community. To better understand short-term responses, we collected information about how plants grew after several years of repeated disturbance in the same season (fall mow, fall burn, spring burn, or undisturbed). We conducted this experiment in a tallgrass prairie that was restored from corn and soy rotational agriculture via seeding. We measured when plants came up in spring and how fast they grew. In a later year, we measured aboveground productivity. Here, we will discuss the results of this research and their implications for management. Additionally, input from people who do hands-on restoration work helps guide research questions that will actually be useful to managers, so we hope to discuss the mismatch between research that is being done and the information that managers actually need. 

In this new, data-light, discussion-heavy format, the intent is to spend more time discussing outcomes and applications than traditional research webinars and make more space for our audience to ask questions. Don’t just listen-in, join the discussion!

Michelle Homann is a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Wisconsin – Madison Department of Integrative Biology, and she studies the effects of management decisions on restored tallgrass prairie plant communities. Through her research, she has examined emergence timing, growth rate, and productivity in established perennial plants, as well as seedling emergence and survival, as responses to fire timing that could inform the trajectory of plant community change. Michelle earned her B.S. from the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, where she fell in love with the blufftop prairies that dot the Mississippi River valley. She spent a summer working to restore prairies and oak savannas in the Driftless Area as a Land Management Intern with the Mississippi Valley Conservancy in La Crosse, WI before deciding to pursue a graduate degree. Michelle cares deeply about addressing questions that matter to land managers and making her research accessible beyond publication in peer-reviewed journals. She will be returning to hands-on land management and restoration work as the next step in her career.