All the makings of natural wonder in your backyard

In 2003 Fred Delcomyn imagined his backyard of two and a half acres, farmed for corn and soybeans for generations, restored to tallgrass prairie. Over the next seventeen years, Delcomyn, with help from his friend James L. Ellis scored, seeded, monitored, reseeded, and burned these acres into prairie. In A Backyard Prairie, they document their journey and reveal the incredible potential of a backyard to travel back to a time before the wild prairie was put into plow rows. It has been said, “Anyone can love the mountains, but it takes a soul to love the prairie.” This book shows us how. 

The first book to celebrate a smaller, more private restoration, A Backyard Prairie offers a vivid portrait of what makes a prairie. Delcomyn and Ellis describe selecting and planting seeds, recount the management of a prescribed fire, and capture the prairie’s seasonal parades of colorful flowers in concert with an ever-growing variety of animals, from the minute eastern tailed-blue butterfly to the imperious red-winged blackbird and the reclusive coyote.

This book offers a unique account of their work and their discovery of a real backyard, an inviting island of grass and flowers uncovered and revealed. We often travel miles and miles to find nature larger than ourselves. In this rich account of small prairie restoration, Delcomyn and Ellis encourage the revival of original prairie in our backyards and the patient, beauty-seeking soul sleeping within ourselves.
 

Most prairies exist today as fragmented landscapes, making thoughtful and vigilant management ever more important. Intended for landowners and managers dedicated to understanding and nurturing their prairies as well as farmers, ranchers, conservationists, and all those with a strong interest in grasslands, ecologist Chris Helzer’s readable and practical manual educates prairie owners and managers about grassland ecology and gives them guidelines for keeping prairies diverse, vigorous, and viable.
     Chapters in the first section, "Prairie Ecology," describe prairie plants and the communities they live in, the ways in which disturbance modifies plant communities, the animal and plant inhabitants that are key to prairie survival, and the importance of diversity within plant and animal communities. Chapters in the second section, "Prairie Management," explore the adaptive management process as well as guiding principles for designing management strategies, examples of successful management systems such as fire and grazing, guidance for dealing with birds and other species that have particular habitat requirements and with the invasive species that have become the most serious threat that prairie managers have to deal with, and general techniques for prairie restoration. Following the conclusion and a forward-thinking note on climate change, eight appendixes provide more information on grazing, prescribed fire, and invasive species as well as bibliographic notes, references, and national and state organizations with expertise in prairie management.
      Grasslands can be found throughout much of North America, and the ideas and strategies in this book apply to most of them, particularly tallgrass and mixed-grass prairies in eastern North Dakota, eastern South Dakota, eastern Nebraska, eastern Kansas, eastern Oklahoma, northwestern Missouri, northern Illinois, northwestern Indiana, Iowa, southwestern Wisconsin, and southwestern Minnesota. By presenting all the factors that promote biological diversity and thus enhance prairie communities, then incorporating these factors into a set of clear-sighted management practices, The Ecology and Management of Prairies in the Central United States presents the tools necessary to ensure that grasslands are managed in the purposeful ways essential to the continued health and survival of prairie communities.

Field Guide to the Lichens of White Rocks is a careful examination of the lichens that occur at the ecologically important and lichenologically rich urban outcropping of Fox Hills sandstone known as White Rocks Nature Preserve, located in Boulder County, Colorado.
 
This extensively illustrated field guide presents detailed information on the macroscopic and microscopic features needed to identify species, as well as extensive notes on how to differentiate closely related lichens—both those present at White Rocks and those likely to be found elsewhere in western North America. This guide is one of the only complete lichen inventories of a sandstone formation in North America and covers all constituents including the crustose microlichen biota, traditionally excluded from other inventories. A short introduction and glossary equip the reader with basic information on lichen morphology, reproduction, and ecology.
 
Visitors to White Rocks Nature Preserve must schedule staff-led public tours or set up sponsored research projects through the City of Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks, and there are many other outcroppings of Fox Hills sandstone across the West, making Field Guide to the Lichens of White Rocks a significant resource for anyone interested in this unique environment. This accessible, user-friendly guide will also be valuable to naturalists and lichenologists around the world as well as educators, conservationists, and land managers concerned with the growing significance of open spaces and other protected urban areas throughout North America.
 
 
The University Press of Colorado gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the University of Colorado Natural History Museum, City of Boulder Parks & Open Spaces, and the Colorado Native Plant Society board and members toward the publication of this book.
 

Island of Grass tells the story of the Cathy Fromme Prairie Natural Area, a 240-acre preserve surrounded by housing developments in Fort Collins, Colorado. This small grassland is a remnant of the once-vast prairies of the West that early European explorers and settlers described as seas of grass.Agricultural land use and urban expansion during the past two centuries have fragmented and altered these prairies. All that remains today are small islands. These remnants cannot support some of the larger animals that once roamed the prairie, but they continue to support a diverse array of plants and animals and can still teach us much about grassland ecology. Through her examinations of daily changes during walks across the Fromme Prairie over the course of a year, Ellen Wohl explores one of the more neglected ecosystems in North America, describing the geology, soils, climate, ecology, and natural history of the area, as well as providing glimpses into the lives of the plants, animals, and microbes inhabiting this landscape. Although small in size, pieces of preserved shortgrass prairie like the Cathy Fromme Prairie Natural Area are rich, diverse, and accessible natural environments deserving of awareness, appreciation, and protection. Anyone concerned with the ecology and conservation of grasslands in general, the ecology and conservation of open space in urban areas, or the natural history of Colorado will be interested in this book.

In the rush of modern life, we measure our lives by the clock, the calendar, the timetable. But there are older rhythms in nature: the call of chickadees before the first hint of spring, the golden face of a compass plant in July, the first snowfall. These signs mark the passage of time in a world that Aldo Leopold knew well and eloquently described.
     With notebook and camera in hand, John and Beth Ross revisit the Aldo Leopold Memorial Reserve in south-central Wisconsin fifty years after Leopold’s death. Thanks to the efforts of Leopold, his family, and the Leopold Foundation, this once-ruined farmland is now largely restored to a natural state. The Rosses explore the terrain of this sandy land, encounter its natural citizens, and relate life here to its physical underpinnings. Following Leopold’s own practice of phenology, they note the seasonal changes: arrivals and departures of wild geese, the blossoming of the pasque flower at the edge of melting snow, the appearance of monarch butterflies on the milkweed. And further, they seek to find in this landscape an underlying morality, a communion of understanding, a sense of place in the cosmos.
     Beautifully illustrated with color photographs, the book also includes notes on the behavior, habitat, and human interactions with ninety-four species of plants, birds, and other animals found in the reserve. An extensive glossary explains terms from geology, ecology, meteorology, and related life and earth sciences.

The tallgrass prairie of the early 1800s, a beautiful and seemingly endless landscape of wildflowers and grasses, is now a tiny remnant of its former expanse. As a literary landscape, with much of the American environmental imagination focused on a mainstream notion of more spectacular examples of wild beauty, tallgrass is even more neglected. Prairie author and advocate John T. Price wondered what it would take to restore tallgrass prairie to its rightful place at the center of our collective identity.

The answer to that question is his Tallgrass Prairie Reader, a first-of-its-kind collection of literature from and about the tallgrass bioregion. Focusing on autobiographical nonfiction in a wide variety of forms, voices, and approaches—including adventure narrative, spiritual reflection, childhood memoir, Native American perspectives, literary natural history, humor, travel writing and reportage—he honors the ecological diversity of tallgrass itself and provides a range of models for nature writers and students.

The chronological arrangement allows readers to experience tallgrass through the eyes and imaginations of forty-two authors from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Writings by very early explorers are followed by works of nineteenth-century authors that reflect the fear, awe, reverence, and thrill of adventure rampant at the time. After 1900, following the destruction of the majority of tallgrass, much of the writing became nostalgic, elegiac, and mythic. A new environmental consciousness asserted itself midcentury, as personal responses to tallgrass were increasingly influenced by larger ecological perspectives. Preservation and restoration—informed by hard science—emerged as major themes. Early twenty-first-century writings demonstrate an awareness of tallgrass environmental history and the need for citizens, including writers, to remember and to help save our once magnificent prairies.