 Mark began his biological career in 1992, studying marine birds, primarily the federally threatened Marble Merlett at sea along the Oregon and Northern California coastlines until 1996. It then worked on federally threatened Aleutian Canadian goose and the western snowy plow over recovery teams in the same locations. Mark has been with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service since 1994 and moved to Devil's Lake in 2002. Since that time, restoration of upland and wetland habitats has been his primary duty. Mark's talk today is an evaluation of prairie reconstruction results with emphasis on native plant species performance and invasive grass recolonization using multiple prescribed management techniques on Fish and Wildlife Service lands. That's a lot. That's a lot? Yeah. Thank you. Thanks, Kevin. Yeah. I mean, how lucky are you? You get to listen to a marine biologist talk about prairie restoration. Sean wanted me to tell you there are no refunds. Yeah. I moved to Devil's Lake in 19 or 2002 and have just really immersed myself into trying to restore habitat and doing things in a very highly fragmented landscape. As a lot of you've talked about, you've talked about native prairie and trying to restore remnant prairies. We ain't got none. It's pretty, pretty weak in northeast North Dakota. And so we've decided that at some point we had to basically punt. And what we're doing is we're trying to just farm sites back and then replanting a lot of native grasses and forbs and trying to get some kind of reconstruction. We don't call it prairie restoration. We call it prairie reconstruction because we're trying to increase that diversity on the landscape and trying to create some kind of resilient community of plants better than smooth brome grass and Kentucky bluegrass. Okay. So our restoration goals were basically just to try to build and maintain some ecological sustainability. What does that mean? That means that we can have these habitats and with some minimal management moving forward, we can try to maintain that native integrity that we visualized when we actually put the seeds in the ground. We always are looking at improving our techniques, you know, doing different things at different times and just trying to keep moving forward with good restoration on the ground. And we lastly, one of our goals is just to understand the performance of the species. The things that we're planning with management, that's key with management. What we do, we hay, we graze, we mow, we burn. And let me say this, we fall dormant burn and we spring burn. There's got to be a distinction between that I hear prescribed fire. That's fine. But we have to have some timing of those fire mechanisms. And then in addition to that, we also want to look at what idling will do this habitat. And we're also always interested in noxious weeds and invasive grasses. So some of the objectives, monitoring the plant performance. And that's pretty simple. I mean, we're looking at density and frequency, looking at the invasive species that are moving in and the recolonization rates, we are going to get them. And I, you know, just like anything, and a lot of the speakers have talked about some things are disappointing. Seeing, especially Kentucky bluegrass, good news, bromegrass kicking its butt. Moving to monitoring, we try to do as close to pre and post management as possible, collecting data before and collecting data after a management treatment. I like to use the Bron Blanc Relevé method. I always get excited when I hear about Josiah Bron Blancay, the Swiss phytos sociologist. And we are plots are 10 meters by 10 meters in size. As Tyler said, we do a lot of the cover and midpoint use. And I carry a little cheat sheet with me when I'm in the field where we're assessing the plant cover values. And then we just we transcribe the data on a daily basis never sits around too long. It comes into the in from the field and it goes right into the computer. And then it usually fall comes around, we're spending more time inside, and we'll transcribe that data to a CSV value and put it in R. I like to use program vegan for any of you anybody here ever use vegan in our half you have you have. Also, we assign some environmental explanatory variables. And those are time and the Chiseido is a growing season at time of operation management, the saline and the soil and all those others that are mixed in through there. And then the response for those variables, which are the plants that we're actually looking at. So first and foremost for some of you like who wears this guy located well here I am I'm up in Northeast North Dakota in the drift planes. In a very grass poor landscape, like I said, we don't have a lot of prairie remnants in that part of the world, mostly up in Cavalier County. And, in fact, Cavalier County soap or I think 5% of the counties in in remnant grass 95% is cropland. It's good black dirt soils good for growing crops and that's a lot of the lands that we're doing this work on as fragmented so it'll be a quarter section or a half section of land. And we're trying just to increase and keep something better than brom and bluegrass which a lot of our waterfall production areas have turned into. So that's where we are in North Dakota. And then of course, we might be grass poor, but we're wetland rich. This is a photograph I took from one of our easement flights back in 2010 during a very wet period. But as you can look across that landscape and see all those potholes of many shapes and sizes. We have a lot of water. And if I remember one farmer telling me one time wetlands are God's little imperfections. And that's a true story. And for a lot of us in the environmental conservation community, I love wetlands crazy about them. So we didn't have an agreement or a meeting of the mind on that day. So getting right into it results. So one of the first things I did was I had to take the data and I had to take all the explanatory variables. They're not all important. They all don't have some kind of a wow factor. To be honest with you, I was hoping management was going to show up as being something important. And it was I ran an ANOVA with all the explanatory variables coupled with the response variables. And the four top winners in the ANOVA exercise were time, management, water storage potential, and soil type. Now I ask you this question of those four. What can I manipulate? What is there that I can actually do to perhaps, I've said it once, drive the bus? I want to be able to direct the stand that I have on the ground. The answer is management, of course. So with the management, I'm breaking the management down as I said earlier into fall burning and spring burning, grain, grazing, hang, mowing, and nothing idle treatment. So with this redundancy analysis exercise, I like it because I can put the by-plot function to it. And you'll note that in the fall burning, I hope you can see that in the back. In the fall burn ellipses, it separates itself out and I am going to get excited about fall burning and talking about it. Just let you know that now. The other treatments have some uniqueness, but generally they're lumped around the center. Fall burning is unique. In addition, what I find fascinating about this ordination plot is all of those species that are associated with fall burns are natives. They're all native species. And even green needle grass is on what closely associated with it and stiff goldenrod up on the top. In the idle ellipses, you'll notice those species up there, there's a bit of difference. And they're mostly natives, but Kentucky bluegrass tends to fall into the idle area. And then if you look at spring burning, you'll see switchgrass likes it apparently. And Canada thistle also does too. And so does Bergamot. But anyway, just the ordination itself was a pretty cool exercise and looking at the hang and grazing. And you can see broom and which is not surprising. Broamgrass is actually increased in those plots, but also Western wheatgrass and slender wheatgrass too. So in the reconstruction, it's pretty interesting in how things are ordinating. And just when you think you got it figured out, multiple factors and complex interactions come into play. And there you are back at step one. Right now this is what we have and this is what we're kind of working on. One of the other objectives I didn't mention is I want to provide my managers that I work with and anybody who will listen. Some level of a reduction of uncertainty regarding management and reconstruction. If you have these habitats, I want you to have an idea of what you're going to get when you perform some type of management. Okay, that's what I work with my managers on and just trying to explain it to them. That's the wrong way. Okay, so this is a chart that's like, whoa, there's a lot of data and a lot of numbers. What I want you to look at is just a focus on big blue stem. Anybody here have been to the horse races? Few people have. When I was a kid, I learned how to pick the ponies from my grandfather. I thought, you know, a fun way to describe data was maybe put it up like a racing form. Races are the management and the explanatory variables. So the races are the response variables. So looking at big blue stem, you'll note that spring burning is its favorite where number one gets at a highest cover value, mean cover value. And you'll see grazing is its lowest. But also notice over at the other side, the probability value. Now I've put them on there anyways, 0.17 and maybe not significant. But I can tell you about big blue stem. It doesn't matter what you do. It's just going to grow and it's going to do well. I used a multi-way ANOVA to get this information out there. Then I want to focus down to green needlegrass, green needlegrass. And you'll notice the p-values 0.001. So it's pretty significant. The cover values will change. But what I find fascinating is number six and I'm telling you spring burning is killing it. If you want to kill green needlegrass, do your spring burning. If you want to wipe it out, you plant it in, you put the money toward it, and then you spring burn it. And then you wonder, what happened to the green needlegrass? Okay. It is something that has shown up time and time again in our plots. And so I'll be honest. I love nacella veridula. It is one of my favorites. And when I see it just disappear, I ask myself, what the hell am I doing? What are we doing as managers? Are we thinking about things like that? So anyways, down at the bottom, I like to finish it out. Total finishes in the money. Most of you know at horse races, when plays show, first, second, third. There's where you get your money back if you bet a show ticket. So anyway, fall burning ends up with 16 results in the money. And idling is actually second with 15 results in the money. So just looking at those, you can see how many races one run, how many first place. You know, I do this for managers. They kind of like to look at data like this. Sometimes there's some heavy duty science charts that are out there, and some of them may not understand it. And then sometimes I don't understand it. But not saying it's hard to interpret. Just something like this is fairly easy. Now, could I do this for invasives? You bet. And we did it. So looking at Kentucky bluegrass spring burning number six, that means it's the lowest value, the lowest, lowest smallest values are in spring burn plots. We've got a management conundrum. I want to control spring burning in a reconstruction. Did I say spring burning? I want to control Kentucky bluegrass in a reconstruction. I'll spring burn it. What happens when I spring burn? I lose my green needlegrass, right? And the results are significant. So that's the management conundrum. What do I do? Is there another alternative treatment? Idling it is showing the highest. Just leaving it and doing nothing. Kentucky bluegrass left to its own device is increasing. So it's just as a manager, you have these questions that come at you and you've got to make a decision. And there's a lot of different things that could happen. Looking down at smooth bone grass fall, burning seems to do a pretty good job of keeping it quite low. As does smooth bone grass. Sorry, as does spring burning. So it's just an interesting way I think to look at the data. So frequency of occurrence is important. I want to point out something like purple cone flower. I don't have the chart up there. It's unfair to look at purple cone flower from a cover value perspective. It's never going to make much cover, right? You might actually end up having a stem or two in a plot. Looking at it from a frequency, like if I know I have 210 Releves and it's showing up in 150 or 160 Releves, I can put a good frequency number to it. And by doing that, I think visually I can see it across the entire landscape. It might be scattered just at a smaller, you know, it will never have a cover value like a big blue stem. But anyway, this chart, these charts show like, for example, big blue stem, our most common cover value that we get is 37%. And with Kentucky bluegrass, 15% is the most frequently encountered midpoint cover value. This is good news, and I mentioned it earlier. Smooth bone grass over 140 of our Releves have zero. Our reconstructions, and I think it's something to do with competitive exclusion. I also think that somehow Kentucky bluegrass is sneaking its way through the soil and the seed that was in the soil originally, because remember, this is reconstruction. Most of these sites are significantly degraded. They're nothing close to native prairie. But I think that there's something to it. Some of you might know that, might know the viability of seed in the soil for a year, 10 years, many decades, it just seems to pop up. Smooth bone grass somehow farming for two to three years prior to restoration seems to be enough to get rid of it. I was using that kind of term, that's like saying never. I don't want everyone to say never. But it seems like our smooth bone grass isn't really an issue for us in our reconstructions. Kentucky bluegrass may be starting to mount an attack and a takeover. So something we're watching with our monitoring. Just to give you an idea of Kentucky bluegrass with prescribed management, you'll see here the spring burning is here on this side and it's pretty low. And you'll see the other two grazing and fall burning, it's still maintaining low. And our hang idling and mowing is where we're seeing our highest values. With smooth bone grass, you can see fall burn, it's just nearly not even there. And I got a couple of photos I'll show you about fall burning that might describe why. But also idling, mowing and spring burning are also decent treatments where its values are very low. And grazing and hang, that's where smooth bone grass is the highest in our releveys. So overall, and you know, how many of you have Jack Norland as one of your professors? Anybody in here? Okay. There's a few. Jack Norland changed my outlook on reconstructions many years ago. He came up to Devil's Lake and we walked out and I was pointing out the Canada thistle and a musk thistle and a patch of brome and Jack said, why do you do that to yourself? Look at the overall. Look at the overall. Look at what we're standing in. We're standing in all this purple and yellow and all this green needlegrass and all this big blue stem and all this native that you've actually been able to successful and actually restoring to the landscape, focusing on the negative and look at the overall and see the good and that was just really some wonderful advice that I got. And it's kind of made my life a little easier. As you'll notice here on this chart, big blue stem definitely rules the day. But what I'm most excited in and up to the first 15 species up to purple prairie clover, we've only got three invasive species. Keep in mind that many of these releveys that I'm talking about are in their eighth to 11th growing season. So we're starting to get a little bit of time behind us. That's exciting to me. I'm not talking two, three, four years out. I'm talking these stands are starting to have a little bit of time. I will be honest on the grazing data that I do have and I'm going to show you my grazing data is weak and I've got some. That's what this summer is going to be all about. We're going to do a lot of relevation grazing habitat. So anyway, this is just the overall structure of what our reconstructions all rolled up. Everyone just doesn't matter what kind of management. This is where we're looking at our reconstruction habitat today. So where we came from. Now this lovely photograph with a fuchsia and lots of bromine bluegrass and alfalfa, the musk thistle itself, our neighbors were driving by saying, what the hell are you guys doing? The county weed boards were like, are you guys going to do something? And we did. We sure did. We'd go out. We'd clip it. We'd spray it with some dye flu fends appear in a couple of years and go by and then somebody asked about the residual chemical. It would wear off. It would come back and we go out and we clip it and we'd spray it. And after a while, you kind of started seeing that dog of yours that chases his tail in a circle. That's what we were doing. We're spending money. We're wasting money. And Cammie and I got some ideas about what are we doing? Can we do something better? Is there something better? We thought, yeah, a prayer reconstruction. Let's give it a go. So this is the same site today. And that was 2005. This is actually this summer, 2022. And it was spring burn. Now I want you just to, when you look at the, I got a dominant and co-dominant grass and the dominant forb. Also, when you read the WPA, that's the year it was planted 15. That's eight growing seasons. And it was treated with spring burn plus one year. So all my charts kind of have that same thing. So this is a real heavy, big blue stem in a spring burn plot in Cavalier County. It's pretty interesting. A little bit monotypical most, but I'll talk about that in a sec. So one of the things, same thing at Thorson, I got this concept that I call the enemy at the gate. I know at the gate in the road ditch is bromegrass and bluegrass. It's loaded up. It's there. As I said, the Kentucky bluegrass seems to be growing from within. The smooth bromegrass is perched at the gate and just can't make it inside. It's not in nine years of growing. And I think, you know, considering the musk thistle and the alfalfa and everything, that's the difference. That's what we're doing today. And we're arriving at ecological sustainability, I think, because with some management, periodic, once every five to six years, that's about it. That's what our management is. At the same time, we're able to produce some wildlife, grow some ducks, songbirds, pollinators. We had a weed tour that I gave back in 2006. And Brad Bramman, who's with the India's extension server, was there. We were talking about weed control and this new wet blade mower we had. This was our answer, was go around spread chemical along with the blade. Well, we decided, you know what, enough of that. The habitat shot is what I want you to see. It's more bromegrass on a WPN Walsh County. So this site was planted in 2019. I think this is pretty phenomenal. I don't know about you. Does anybody not like this photo? Okay, good. We're on the same page. I just, I got so enthused. I told, I wrote the manager. I said, this is the hand of Christ. That's what I told him. And he was like, I like to come up and see it. I was pretty excited about it. And then this is the same site last year. We went back a couple years after that. And it was a little later. It's kind of, you know, the flowers express themselves at certain times. So for a little later in August, we're going to miss the purples. But, you know, throughout the stand itself, it's just got good structure. And there is quite a bit of diversity still going on. And that's exciting. Grazing, like I said, my grazing information is just really not that solid. I can't really speak a lot about what the varieties were. But still, you'll notice some green needle grass growing in there and quite a few forbs. It's actually, in my opinion, quite lovely. And we will mull occasionally. And in this case, if you see behind Brian in the photo, you might be able to pick up some absinthe wormwood. We're getting a little bit of wormwood in some of these plots, but nothing to be too concerned about. And so some of the mowing was a little bit of a fundamental science and really didn't have a lot of botany experience. But after you did a bunch of relevance, he came to me one day and he said, I think big blue stem is an invasive species. And I'm like, are you kidding? And I said, whoa, that's an interesting concept. And from that, we discovered that where we have our lighter big blue stem, our smaller big blue stem density, we have a lot of that. And so in the moment, out of the mouth of babes came this really great comment, I thought. So just a couple of, pardon me, couple of mowing slides just showing some progression of some mowing. We're running out of time according to Sean. This one I want to show you, this is old Adeline. This is an idle plot, seven years idle. And this is nine years idle. Do you like that? Does that look pretty cool? Not hearing anything? I think it is. I think it's pretty interesting. I'm not advocating idling these habitats, not doing it. Not saying that. Lastly, fall burning. I think we got this burned in 2020 and it went through one year of drought. I think if you look down at the bottom of the photo, you can see how it's scalded the ground. It's pretty amazing. And you can actually see the western wheatgrass. And what's really cool about this one is that it's got blue grama, lead plant, some of the different species that we had that were dominant in there and that this was the following year. Notice all the green eel grass is still persisting in this plot. This was fall burned. And this is fall burned plus two years. So it's pretty exciting. So can we do better? Of course we can. This project site here I want to show you. On the top of the hills, I think in that work. What we did was we did a little native harvest. We brought it down. We broadcast seeded it here. And what's unique about that is in my part of the world, we don't do that. I don't even think the NRCS accepts broadcast seeding as a restoration technique. We tried it. People in Minnesota and South Dakota and Nebraska, they've been doing it for years. We gave it a go. And this is a piece of prairie that was photographed in mid- August. What I think is coolest is the number of species that I found. Management wasn't something wasn't an objective for this plot, this site. But what was the coolest was the number of species. When I would go out and do the releves, I was constantly getting higher numbers of plant species from the native harvest. And because of that, I just wanted to put out a species accumulation curve for you. And you can see that in the native harvest, we're upwards of 70 species and growing. We've got a lot of restrictions where we're buying cultivars and seeding them into the ground. You'll know that we're somewhere up around 42 species. And it's pretty much capped out. And that's pretty much about the best it can get. And just when you think you figure it out, multiple factors and complex interactions, an ecology shows up and you're just like, oh, I thought I had it figured out. And now I'm back to square one. That's what I got.