 And our last speaker for the afternoon session will be Dr. John DeKaiser. Dr. DeKaiser is a professor in the School of Natural Resource Sciences at NDSU where he has researched wetland and prairie assessment, wetland and prairie restoration and invasive species management. Throughout his years, he has collaborated with the federal and state agencies as well as private and nonprofit organizations. His most rewarding part of his work is collaborating with others towards the common goal of understanding and improving our remaining natural areas. He wants to personally thank everybody for showing up today and participating in this workshop. And he looks forward to working together to confront the issues related to invasive species for the improvement of our natural areas. Dr. DeKaiser's talk today is trends in prairie pommel region plant community composition after a decade of enrollment in the native prairie adaptive management program. Let's thank, let's welcome Sean. So this talk will actually play a little bit off of what Kami already presented. So again, we looked at the native prairie adaptive management units and we actually broke out a subset of those units to look at in a very much more detailed manner than they do with their belt transects. I do want to put a plug in for my co-authors, especially Carly Coleman. She was a master student on this project. She was an excellent field botanist for a master student. Did a great job. And she was also a very good writer and did great work with analysis. Also, Brea Kobelia, who's my research specialist. She's a statistical guru. And so I'm always a little bit timid of answering any questions about statistics. And I don't think she's in the audience. So I might be under the gun here. And then of course Kami Dixon and we've had a long relationship in looking at our prairie and wetland ecosystems and the care they're up. So the research occurred in the prairie pothole region. We know this region well, right? It's like 770,000 square kilometers. Our focus was in North Dakota and South Dakota. Again, so if you think about the prairie pothole region, everything kind of east of the Missouri River in those two states. We know historically this area was dotted with wetlands across the landscape, but those wetlands had an intricate linkage to the uplands, right? So we also know the importance of this area. I mean, to me, this is a keystone habitat, right? Especially when we think of waterfowl and water birds that occur in the area. As pointed out prior, we've lost a lot of the grassland area in these regions. The areas that we were focused on in the tall grass prairie area, it's upwards to 99% of the grassland is gone, right? Especially if you think of the Red River Valley, it's all gone. But even within that drift prairie area, we have a greater than 70% loss of that grassland area. Not only that, those remaining natural areas that we do have, those places that haven't been plowed or haven't been touched, we've disrupted the fire and grazing processes. And we know that those are very important to this ecosystem, right? And it's kind of been mentioned and highlighted a little bit throughout the talks, but this grassland system is a disturbance-driven ecosystem. Disturbances are very important to this area. And not only fire and grazing, but things like drought. And we've had some drought-like years. I mean, we think of 2021, but if you look actually in the last 30 years, it's pretty similar, right? Across the area. It's almost been daylight. All right, and then we got these invasive species. And a lot of the focus that we've been looking at is Kentucky bluegrass, smooth brome. If we go further west, we think of crested wheatgrass. There's some that haven't even been mentioned yet, like in wetland systems, right? Reconary grass is an issue. I used to think that reconary was just an issue from basically the Minnesota border eastward. And it's been amazing. Over my lifetime of doing this research, I've watched it move west. And I think Seth Jones will present some research that shows it's expanded quite a bit westwards, where I never thought that would happen. Boy, that's a real downer. All right, so, and Cammy went over in detail the native prairie adaptive management or the MPAM program, okay? And just to reiterate, they go out, they monitor, right? And based on, again, they have these belt transects, pretty coarse, but based on the results of those, then they decide what their management's going to be that following year, right? So they go out, they might say, okay, this needs to be grazed this year. And then they'll go monitor again. And then based on that, they'll continue the management protocol. It might be prescribed burning. It might be a prescribed burn and a grazed. It might be a rest. Cammy, I need to make sure I'm right on this. The burn graze though is burn one year, graze the next. So both in the same year. Okay, yeah, thank you. Okay, so again, those were the treatments. So, you know, I was wondering, okay, I know and I understand that the fish and wildlife need to do the belt transects, and right, and sometimes you're training people, new people every year to do these, and it's good information. I was wondering, okay, you know, sometimes we don't see these changes happen but in increments over time, right? And it might be one species moving in, another one moving out. And you can't get that level of accuracy within, you know, a belt transect method. So I proposed her, let's go in a little bit deeper with finer methods and get more detailed data with this. So we proposed that, she thought it was a good idea and we went out in 2000, it was 2012, right? 2012, 2013. And we put in some modified Whitaker plots, which I'll go over. So basically we went out and surveyed in 2012, in 2013, all right, and we were looking at, okay, can we see changes based on their management just in those two years? And, you know, it kind of gave us a baseline of what's going on, right? So basically our first questions then from this updated, more recent survey, excuse me, is has there been any changes in the plant community composition since 2012? Okay, so we redid this survey in 2020, 2021. Okay, and then is there a relationship between the management and environmental variables in the plant community composition? Okay, over that same time period. Okay, and then from our 2012, 2013 assessment, okay, we found out that frequent prescribed burning was equal to West smooth brome and we were getting higher species richness overall. Okay, so based on those results in 2012, 2013, were we seeing the same thing through time from our more recent survey? So we wanted to retest that. Okay, so how has increased burn frequency influence plant community composition on N-PAN units over time? So that's the last question we have. Okay, so we looked at 30 sites enrolled in the N-PAN program. I believe we did a total of, I believe 30, 37 sites and some of those were N-PAN units. We were actually looking at some odd management, like we went down to Ordway Prairie. If you guys know Ordway Prairie, they've got a pasture that's been burned and grazed by, it's been burned and grazed by Bison since 1978. So we did some plots in there to see if it was any difference. Surprisingly, it wasn't. They'd had as much smooth brome in Kentucky bluegrass as everybody else. So anyway, so what we did is we actually selected 30 sites so we had had a balanced approach. And again, with the idea that we did see burning frequency and the amount of smooth brome and then the number of native species differences, we had 15 sites that had zero to two burns so a low burning frequency and then 15 sites that had three or more burns. Okay, and we did this three or more burns because based on our 2012, 2013 data, we were seeing those ones that had more than three burns actually showing those differences and decreased smooth brome and increased native plant diversity. Most of the burns occurred early to mid-May. And so those were at moderate intensities. Okay, so we use this modified Whitaker sampling method. It's a method that if you really want to look at it, it's a Stolgren paper. It's been used widely in especially prairie ecology. I really like it personally because you get real detailed data from it. But it's a 20 by 50 meter plot. Okay, so within those plots, you actually estimate the percent cover in 10, one square meter quadrats. Okay, and then to get the idea of overall species richness, you record every species occurrence in two 10 meter plots in the corners and then the 100 meter plot in the center and then the entire 1000 meter plot, okay? You get pretty detailed data with this in the end. You know what the major cover is, you actually get a lot of what the species richness is. Okay, so initially, so we only put these on Lomi ecological sites. And again, that was a lot based on what we were seeing as far as Kentucky bluegrass, blue brome seemed to like those Lomi ecological sites. Lomi ecological site is the predominant ecological site in this eco region, all right? There was a lot of reasons we put it on Lomi soils. Okay, and then we just actually randomly put GIS points out there and went out, we surveyed it. Okay, yeah, this is all Lomi. If it wasn't, we kicked it out one to the next random point, all right? And so we, depending on the size of the MPAM unit, we'd put anywhere from three to five of these across the landscape. We did test for sample size adequacy and how many of these plots we'd need per sampling unit. And we found that three was adequate, okay? So some of these areas that we would surveyed, we maybe surveyed five plots in 2012. We just did three in the most recent survey, okay? And so we randomly just picked from those five plots, three plots and went out and resurveyed them. So these were permanently marked. So we just basically put these big washers and then we could go out and find them with metal detector and we could reset them up based on a random bearing point. Okay, so they were basically the exact same plot scheme getting resurveyed. So first questions again, changes in plant community composition over time, okay? So the way we analyze that is just a simple pair of T tests to compare between years. And then basically testing the management environmental variables. We did distance-based redundancy analysis, okay? We also looked at burn frequency and plant community composition, permutational analysis of variance, and then we used non-metric multidimensional scaling and then T tests. And then all the analysis were done in PC or in SAS. So first, changes in plant community composition in 2012 to 2020. These are all starting 2010, right? Yeah, so it's basically a decade of being in the impanel program. So community composition diversity metrics. So we looked at total species richness. This is simply the number of species, native species richness, floristic quality index. Does anybody not know what the floristic quality index is? Please raise your hand. There's a couple of you, okay. All right, so the floristic quality index is basically within our region, we got a panel of botanists together. This was back in 2000, all right? And we looked at every native species within North Dakota and South Dakota, within the region. And we assigned basically what's called a conservatism value, a C value, ranging from zero to 10, all right? So zero would be something you would find in almost anywhere, road sides, whatever. Think of annual ragweed. That's an annual native species, all right? 10 would be very conservative to only natural native areas. So think of the Western fringe prairie orchid, right? We get a 10, all right? Does that make sense? And so it'd be anywhere in between. And so what you have, it's kind of this native species richness, but also giving a value to the species that you actually find there, all right? So what's making up that richness? So the higher that area, you can think of it as probably the more native that you're gonna find there, right? Make sense? Yeah, all right. All right, so what we found was that the total species richness went up, but not significantly. Native species richness did go up, not significantly, but the floristic quality index did increase significantly, okay? So basically it's saying, okay, yeah, you know what? We are getting an increase in richness. It wasn't significant. However, the species that are moving in there are those more conservative species. So we are getting native species in there and the ones we probably want to see. That makes sense? So we also broke it up by functional groups, right? So native species, all forbs, all shrubs, all gravenoids, native warm season gravenoids and native cool season gravenoids. Native species relative cover, it was up, but not significantly. Forbs, again, that cover was up, again, not significantly. The shrubs though, right? The shrub relative cover, things like Western Snowberry, Silverberry, significantly increased over that time period. Okay, we've actually seen other research show that shrub covers increased over time as well. The gravenoid relative cover significantly decreased. We break that up even further. We did see an increase in warm season grasses. Of course, you look at the percentage, right? There's not a whole lot of warm season cover out there, right? We're in the cool season dominated area, right? It wasn't significant. However, there was a significant decrease in the cool season gravenoid relative cover. We look at introduced species that make Cammie happy. All right. There was a decrease in the relative cover at Kentucky Bluegrass. Now let's see Cammie's other face. There was a big increase in smooth brome relative cover. Again, this is just comparing 2012 to 2020 across all sites, all right? We haven't brought the sites out into different categories yet. Right? And this one kind of surprised us. Now we were seeing a significant increase in yellow sweet cobra relative cover. All right, so there, I threw a lot out there, okay? But just this kind of nail the points home. So the impam units are becoming more diverse and increasing in florist equality over time. Forbes, shrubs, native warm season gravenoid, smooth brome and yellow sweet cobra are increasing. Native cool season gravenoids in Kentucky Bluegrass are declined, at least according to our data. Okay, so the relationship between management variables and species composition. And these were just predetermined variables that we thought, well, we wanted to one test actually their management, but also some ideas that we knew that there were probably site location differences and we wanted to test those as well. So we have the northern, the number of burns. All right, and I want to point that out because of what we found in 2012, 2013. Number of grazes, years since last burn and years since the last grace. Okay, so again, we had a two dimensional solution with this explaining 44.3% of the variation. And access one, a site location in years since graze. Access two seems to be the number of burns. Okay, the only significant ones were, in fact, the most significant one was the site location. All right, so that was driving the differences within that 2020 data set from what we were seeing from basically this plant community down in northeastern South Dakota is totally different from this plant community up in northwestern North Dakota, which is not surprising to us, all right? Cause one's a kind of a tall grass prairie area. One's a very dry mixed grass prairie area. In fact, it kind of jumped out on David's slide that they had the one area of yellow up in way northwestern part of North Dakota that didn't have as much Kentucky bluegrass. So one of our sites landed right on there. And if you go out there, it's a very dry site that there is crested wheat out there, but it's totally different than any of those. So it doesn't make, it didn't surprise us at all that the northern would be. Years since graze was also a driving factor. So you could imagine when you take grazing off, all of a sudden you get this increase maybe on something like smooth brome. You get a change in the plant community composition. And the same thing you'll see with years since burn. Okay, so again, now we're jumping gears. We wanted to look at just the burn frequency data. And so again, remember the zero to two years burns and the three or more burns or zero to two burns and three more. We wanted to look at native species richness. And again, the forest equality index again, remember the high FQI values, more native conservative species. And we didn't find any difference. Okay, the forest equality, yeah, it was slightly higher. If you had three or more burns, yeah, the native species richness was slightly higher but not significant. I throw this up here's the the non-metric multi-dimensional scaling. I just wanted to throw this up here, okay? And again, so the closer to the gather, the more they resemble one another, right? And plant community composition. And notice the zero to two burns, they're kind of tightly fit. And then when you look at these three or more burns they're just like spread out all over the place. I don't know why that is, right? It could be for a number of factors, the timing of the burn, right? The location, we just quite, we need to tease that out more, okay? But what I want to notice, so anywhere where this triangle is, if the triangle is bigger, means there's more relative cover of that species. If it's smaller, there's less, all right? The black triangles are three or more burns, the open triangles, zero to two. If you look at Kentucky bluegrass, for me there's, I mean, I can't tell any difference between them. I mean, they look pretty similar, right? I would say the same with smooth brown, there's equal representation depending on what the burns were. But then all of a sudden you look at this one. Something's going on there, wouldn't you say? If you had three or more burns, that's doing something to yellow sweet clover. Well, sure enough, when we did the T test, no significant difference in Kentucky bluegrass abundance. It did seem like, you know, smooth brome was dropping like we saw in 2012, but not significantly. But there was this significant increase in yellow sweet clover, okay? So there's some research showing that yellow sweet clover germination is triggered by burning and burning at infrequent. Greater than two year intervals is known to promote its expansion, all right? The other thing I want to note is that these sites right here are all tallgrass prairie sites. So it might be the equal region as well of where you're burning at, right? So the impan programs burns recommendations may inadvertently favor yellow sweet clover, especially in those tallgrass prairie sites. So conclusions, changes in community diversity and species composition occurred on impan units between 2012 and 2020. Variation in species composition across sites has correlated with location, year since graze and number of times burn. However, changes in native species richness, floristic quality and relative cover of Kentucky bluegrass and smooth brome did not continue to respond to increased burn frequency over time. More frequent burning inadvertently favored yellow sweet clover expansion, especially in those tallgrass prairie sites. So what does this mean for management? Continue to implement burning to improve floristic quality. However, prescribed burning may not need to occur frequently as frequently to a changes in species composition or timing of burning may need to be explored further. Is Sarah gonna talk about this? All right, so we'll actually tackle this tomorrow. Is that her? Yeah, all right, so, and we've discussed this because there's evidence that we might not be doing it at the right time, which it's actually exciting evidence in my point of view. Reverse floristic degradation requires continued commitment to restoring ecological integrity. And again, this idea of we gotta just keep of adaptive management up. It's always gotta be constant. And predicting management outcomes will be improved by increasing our understanding of ecological processes, driving species change and remnant prairie. All right, thank you all to all of the US Fish and Wildlife Service staff that helped. And it's just been a great project to work on over the years.