Patching together a 'messy landscape'

By Doug Rich

If it were possible to have a satellite image of the original tallgrass prairie at about the time Columbus stepped onto this continent, what would it look like?

"It would have looked like a mess," Bob Hamilton said. "It was a shifting patch mosaic of a landscape."

Tallgrass Prairie Preserve

Hamilton is director of the 38,700-acre Tallgrass Prairie Preserve near Pawhuska, Okla. The Nature Conservancy, an international non-profit conservation group, owns and manages the property located in the Big Osage region of Oklahoma just south of the Kansas border.

That acreage is just a small part of the original tallgrass prairie that covered nearly 142 million acres across 14 states. The natural forces that created this unique ecosystem were climate, fire, and grazing. Those forces are still at work today.

"Our objective, when we got into this project back in the late 1980s, was to protect plants and animals native to the tallgrass ecosystem," Hamilton said. "The best way to do that is to have their habitats functioning in a natural way--as close as we can get to the pre-settlement system."

If you want that type of system, then you need wildlife and habitat diversity. Conservationists refer to this as heterogeneity, which means variability or diversity of habitat types. On the 24,000-acre bison unit within the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve Hamilton is attempting to accomplish this with patch burning.

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