 Hi, my name is Cameron Duquette and I am a PhD student in the range science department at North Dakota State University. And we're studying ways to create floral resources for pollinators. It's not hard to imagine that the status of our grassland pollinators is closely related to our prairie wildflowers. And a diverse and abundant wildflower community supports a similarly diverse and abundant pollinator community. But abundance isn't the only thing that matters. You need to have consistent resources throughout the year. So a diverse wildflower community breeds a diverse phenology. So by phenology, I mean species are blooming at all different points during the year. And for instance, if you have a sweet clover patch, you're going to have a lot of flowers in mid-summer, but not much available for pollinators in early spring and late summer. So one way to ensure a high variety of flowers that have a diverse phenology is to do plantings with a wide variety of species. That way you have something blooming all the time. But this can be really expensive. Depending on the species, wildflower seeds can cost hundreds of dollars. And this might be prohibitively expensive. This got us to wonder if there might be another way to get plants flowering throughout the growing season. So previous research has shown that plant flowering can be synchronized to a disturbance. So in this case, fire and grazing. We wondered if the restoration of fire and grazing to our grasslands through a patch burn system could help to diversify our phenology. So I'll go through patch burn grazing again really quickly. So the idea is that every year you burn part of your pasture. In our case, it's a quarter of it. We have a four-year fire return interval. And the burn patch, when it comes back, the new growth is low in fiber, high in protein. The cattle really like it. So they'll graze that down. And then that will help keep that short while the rest of it grows up. And then each year you move fire around the landscape. And so you get a gradient of time since fire. You get everything from like what we've got right here in front of us, which was burned this spring to over there. You can see it's been a while since we've had fire. And so this is kind of like setting a watch to different time zones, we were thinking. So you can get maximum flower abundance at different times in each of the times since fire passed. So if you get a high noon, if you will, or maximum flower abundance at different times, then that extends the total time over the growing season that flowers are available on the landscape. And so we also wanted to know how fire impacts flower diversity and abundance. So after years of fire suppression and the invasion of non-native, sod-forming grasses like Kentucky bluegrass, that's left a lot of our grasslands in North Dakota with a thick thatch layer. And you can think of this as mulching your flower bed. It creates a blanket and it keeps those flowers from poking through and expressing themselves. And usually though on our grasslands here, the flowers are still there even if they're not showing themselves. And that's because most of our flowering forbs are long-lived perennials. So if you crawl around on your hands and knees and do some digging, you can usually find them. They're just not able to poke up and thus be available for pollinators. So our methods were pretty simple. To take a look at the effect of patchburn grazing on flower phenology, we walked weekly transects where we counted all flowering stems on either side of our transect out to one meter. And we did that each week for two years from the middle of May to the beginning of September. And then we compared patchburn grazing with a more traditional season-long grazing pasture. And in this treatment, we had no fire, no interior fencing, and cattle were free to use the whole area. So after two years of data collection, we had over 140 species and well over one million flowering stems. And this supports our hypothesis. We found that on average, most flowering plants were available for about two weeks longer in our patchburn pastures compared to our season-long pastures. And this is for two reasons. In areas that burned, so just think of a single patch, the flowers were blooming for longer at a specified abundance, but also the watch metaphor I was talking about earlier, you have peak abundance happening at different times in a diverse vegetation pasture compared to the season-long pastures where it's kind of all smushed to one. So we found that by mid-summer, our patchburn pastures had three to four times the amount of floral resources than season-long grazing. It was a little more modest when it comes to diversity, but we did see a 20% bump in diversity in our patchburn pastures in terms of species compared to the season-long pastures. And so our results show that patchburn grazing, in addition to its other wildlife and livestock benefits, may be a viable alternative for pollinators. By having a diversity of time since fire on the landscape, we had a diversity of bloom times and enhanced abundance and diversity of wildflowers. It's important to keep in mind that the flowers were already here, so if you were doing something on, say, post-CRP with a low diversity, plantings might be required anyways. But even if you do that after you have your forbs established, patchburning would allow you to have a longer bloom time with less forbs than you would have to do otherwise. So the next time you walk through a pasture in the spring and summer, spend some time thinking about what pollinators might be out there, what floral resources they'd be using, and what you can do to increase the amount and diversity of floral resources for them.