Part 1 in a series of posts and photos showing my time here in Nebraska working as a Restoration and Stewardship Field Assistant for Prairie Plains Resource Institute.
“The beauty here is often subtle. It doesn’t knock you off your feet at a glance the way the snow-capped Colorado Rockies or the rugged coastline of the Pacific Northwest do. But it can be every bit as remarkable.”
– Michael Forsberg Continue reading “A season in the Nebraska prairies, Part 1”
Previously, I wrote about fire ecology and shared an excellent documentary about prescribed fire in the Everglades National Park. Jennifer Brown, who made the “River of Fire” documentary, has made another about using prescribed fire on the Boy Scouts of America’s Camp Everglades, which is situated in a fire-dependent southern pine forest within the Everglades ecoregion called the Pine Rocklands.
Fire is good, Smokey is misguided! Enjoy!
A lot of people in this region of the country have some commonly stated misconceptions about Juniper species, colloquially referred to as “cedar”, though there are no true cedar (Cedrus spp.) native to North America.
The first misconception is usually along the lines of, “Juniper sucks water from the soil and is a water hog.” Not quite so. Juniper is very shallow-rooted and is not considered a phreatophyte plant, so therefore that line of thought does not hold water (pun intended). Continue reading “Juniper, “the plant we love to hate””
The Roaming Ecologist 