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Outline

Title
Abstract
FAQs
Introduction
Study Objectives
Study Area
Methods
PLS Methods
Data Analysis
PLS Vegetation Mapping and Analysis
Results
Discussion
References

Grassland-Forest Transition

Profile image of Marlin BowlesMarlin Bowles

2015

Abstract

Tallgrass prairie extends eastward in a narrowing peninsula across northern Illinois into adjacent Indiana. This vegetation reflects a longitudinal gradient of decreasing drought severity, and local vegetation patterned by interactions between fire and landscape firebreaks. Understanding how these processes shaped vegetation provides an ecological context for restoration management as well as a baseline for projecting effects of ongoing climate change on vegetation. We analyzed vegetation across this region using maps, notes and witness tree data from the Government Land Office Public Land Survey (PLS) of Lake, Porter, and LaPorte counties, Indiana, which was conducted in 1829-1835. We examined how topography, landscape firebreaks and proximity to Lake Michigan interact to mediate the transition from grassland to forest across this region and compared it to vegetation pattern in adjacent Illinois.

FAQs

sparkles

AI

What explains the vegetation patterns observed across the Prairie Peninsula?add

The study reveals that vegetation patterns were influenced by interactions between climate, fire, and landscape features, particularly revealing a mosaic of prairie and oaks with varied densities based on local fire protection.

How does tree density vary across different ecological regions?add

Research indicates tree density ranges significantly, with open savanna (<10 trees/ha) prevalent in the western areas, while density increases to over 100 trees/ha in forest conditions toward the east.

What role did fire play in shaping vegetation types in this study?add

The analysis demonstrates that fire significantly affected the landscape, with fire-resistant oaks dominant in savanna, while shade-tolerant species increasingly occupied protected forest habitats.

When did the transition from grassland to forest begin in this region?add

The transition initiated around 6,000-8,000 years BP during the Holocene, influenced by climatic conditions and fire frequency, creating a dynamic mosaic of ecosystems.

What species are identified as dominant in various vegetation types?add

The PLS data identifies black oak and white oak as dominant in timber, while fire-tolerant species like burr oak were common in barrens and savanna conditions.

Related papers

Effects of site, landscape features, and fire regime on vegetation patterns in presettlement southern Wisconsin
Christopher Dunn

Landscape Ecology, 1991

The presettlement tree cover (1831-33) of 3 townships in a southern Wisconsin landscape was analyzed using original survey records. Four forest types were identified: closed forest, open forest, savanna, and prairie. Comparisons of vegetation types and landscape pattern were made between the east and west sides of the Pecatonica River, which bisects the landscape and could have acted as a natural fire barrier. West of the river, presettlement tree species richness and diversity were lower and trees were smaller in diameter and less dense than to the east. The major vegetation types to the west were prairie (42(rlo of landscape) and savanna (400'10), both fire-susceptible types. Prairie was more common on gentle slopes than on other landforms. To the east, the landscape was 70% forested (closed plus open forest). Here, prairie was more frequent on steep dry sites. These vegetation differences, including the contrasting landscape placement of prairie, are attributed to distinct site characteristics and to disturbance (fire) regimes, with the west likely having more frequent fires. In terms of the four vegetation types, the east landscape was more homogeneous, being dominated by closed forest (50%). West of the Pecatonica River, the landscape was more heterogeneous because of the high proportion of both prairie and savanna; however, in terms of flammability of vegetation, the west was essentially homogeneous (82% prairie plus savanna).

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A Comparison of Illinois Remnant Prairies, 1976 to 1988
Erica Corbett

2004

At one time, 60% of Illinois' land area was covered with prairie, but 99% of that prairie has been lost. Currently, 2,300 acres (about 930 hectares) of remnant prairie is protected in the Illinois Nature Preserves System. Many of these sites were surveyed in the mid-1970s as part of the Illinois Natural Areas Inventory (lNA!). 1 analyzed vegetation data as relative frequency of herbaceous species. Data were analyzed using Detrended Correspondence Analysis (DCA) to determine environmental influences on species composition. I also resampled 29 of the original sites in summer 1998. In addition to collecting data on relative freque ncy of prairie species, I collected soils and had them analyzed for texture and nutrient availability. In both the 1970s and 1998 samples, moisture availability as related to a topographic gradient was the major environmental fac tor affecting species distribution and abundance. For the 1998 samples, there were relationships between ordination axis scores and soil nutrients, but soil nutrien ts were not a major factor affecting species composition. When the 1970s and 1998 samples were compared, there were no major changes in species composition, but there were changes in species abundance. There was no conclusive evidence for loss of species from any sites, although there was an increase in abundance of introduced Eurasian weedy species between the 1970s and 1998.

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Drought and fire suppression lead to rapid forest composition change in a forest-prairie ecotone
David Stahle

Forest Ecology and Management, 2011

Altered fire regimes and increased drought can lead to major vegetation changes, especially in ecotones. A decrease in fire can lead to woody species encroachment in prairies and increasing forest stand density. The threat of global climate change raises questions about potential increases in the length, severity, and incidence of droughts substantially altering species composition. Re-measured upland forests in south-central North America's midcontinent forest-prairie ecotone exhibited major changes in woody species composition and structure over fifty years and successional trajectories appeared to favor invasive Juniperus virginiana L. over the previous dominant Quercus species. The objective of this study was to determine whether climate and fire exclusion affected the recruitment history of dominant woody species in these upland forests located near the xeric western edge of the eastern deciduous forest biome of North America. We removed cores and cross-sections from 992 J. virginiana, Quercus marilandica Münchh. and Q. stellata Wangenh. trees from eleven forest stands located across central and northwest Oklahoma, and determined their ages using standard dendrochronological methods. Recruitment of all species increased following a severe mid-20th century drought, but a rapid increase in J. virginiana recruitment and decrease in Quercus recruitment appeared to be linked to a decrease in fire. Future fire regime changes and increased drought due to global climate change could lead to widespread shifts from Quercusto Juniperusdominated forests and cause substantial changes to ecosystem services.

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Loss of aboveground forest biomass and landscape biomass variability in Missouri, US
Hong S. He

Ecological Complexity, 2016

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Woodland-to-forest transition during prolonged drought in Minnesota after ca. AD 1300
Colin Plank

Ecology, 2009

Interactions among multiple causes of ecological perturbation, such as climate change and disturbance, can produce ''ecological surprises.'' Here, we examine whether climate-fire-vegetation interactions can produce ecological changes that differ in direction from those expected from the effects of climate change alone. To do so, we focus on the ''Big Woods'' of central Minnesota, USA, which was shaped both by climate and fire. The deciduous Big Woods forest replaced regional woodlands and savannas after the severity of regional fire regimes declined at ca. AD 1300. A trend toward wet conditions has long been assumed to explain the forest expansion, but we show that water levels at two lakes within the region (Wolsfeld Lake and Bufflehead Pond) were low when open woodlands were transformed into the Big Woods. Water levels were high instead at ca. 2240-795 BC when regional fire regimes were most severe. Based on the correlation between water levels and fireregime severity, we infer that prolonged or repeated droughts after ca. AD 1265 reduced the biomass and connectivity of fine fuels (grasses) within the woodlands. As a result, regional fire severity declined and allowed tree populations to expand. Tree-ring data from the region show a peak in the recruitment of key Big Woods tree species during the AD 1930s drought and suggest that low regional moisture balance need not have been a limiting factor for forest expansion. The regional history, thus, demonstrates the types of counterintuitive ecosystem changes that may arise as climate changes in the future.

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Repeated burning of eastern tallgrass prairie increases richness and diversity, stabilizing late successional vegetation
Marlin Bowles

Ecological Applications, 2013

Understanding temporal effects of fire frequency on plant species diversity and vegetation structure is critical for managing tallgrass prairie (TGP), which occupies a midcontinental longitudinal precipitation and productivity gradient. Eastern TGP has contributed little information toward understanding whether vegetation-fire interactions are uniform or change across this biome. We resampled 34 fire-managed mid-and late-successional ungrazed TGP remnants occurring across a dry to wet-mesic moisture gradient in the Chicago region of Illinois, USA. We compared hypotheses that burning acts either as a stabilizing force or causes change in diversity and structure, depending upon fire frequency and successional stage. Based on western TGP, we expected a unimodal species richness distribution across a coverproductivity gradient, variable functional group responses to fire frequency, and a negative relationship between fire frequency and species richness. Species diversity was unimodal across the cover gradient and was more strongly humpbacked in stands with greater fire frequency. In support of a stabilizing hypothesis, temporal similarity of late-successional vegetation had a logarithmic relationship with increasing fire frequency, while richness and evenness remained stable. Temporal similarity within mid-successional stands was not correlated with fire frequency, while richness increased and evenness decreased over time. Functional group responses to fire frequency were variable. Summer forb richness increased under high fire frequency, while C 4 grasses, spring forbs, and nitrogen-fixing species decreased with fire exclusion. On mesic and wet-mesic sites, vegetation structure measured by the ratio of woody to graminoid species was negatively correlated with abundance of forbs and with fire frequency. Our findings that species richness responds unimodally to an environmentalproductivity gradient, and that fire exclusion increases woody vegetation and leads to loss of C 4 and N-fixing species, suggest that these processes are uniform across the TGP biome and not affected by its rainfall-productivity gradient. However, increasing fire frequency in eastern TGP appears to increase richness of summer forbs and stabilize late-successional vegetation in the absence of grazing, and these processes may differ across the longitudinal axis of TGP. Managing species diversity in ungrazed eastern TGP may be dependent upon high fire frequency that removes woody vegetation and prevents biomass accumulation.

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Dry forests and wildland fires of the inland Northwest USA: Contrasting the landscape ecology of the pre-settlement and modern eras
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Prior to Euro-American settlement, dry ponderosa pine and mixed conifer forests (hereafter, the "dry forests") of the Inland Northwest were burned by frequent low-or mixed-severity fires. These mostly surface fires maintained low and variable tree densities, light and patchy ground fuels, simplified forest structure, and favored fire-tolerant trees, such as ponderosa pine, and a low and patchy cover of associated fire-tolerant shrubs and herbs.

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A Dendroecological Investigation of an Upland Oak-Dominated Forest within the Grand Prairie Region of Illinois
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Fire cycles in North American interior grasslands and their relation to prairie drought
Ivanka Stefanova

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2005

High-resolution analyses of a late Holocene core from Kettle Lake in North Dakota reveal coeval fluctuations in loss-on-ignition carbonate content, percentage of grass pollen, and charcoal flux. These oscillations are indicative of climate–fuel–fire cycles that have prevailed on the Northern Great Plains (NGP) for most of the late Holocene. High charcoal flux occurred during past moist intervals when grass cover was extensive and fuel loads were high, whereas reduced charcoal flux characterized the intervening droughts when grass cover, and hence fuel loads, decreased, illustrating that fire is not a universal feature of the NGP through time but oscillates with climate. Spectral and wavelet analyses reveal that the cycles have a periodicity of ≈160 yr, although secular trends in the cycles are difficult to identify for the entire Holocene because the periodicity in the early Holocene ranged between 80 and 160 yr. Although the cycles are evident for most of the last 4,500 yr, their o...

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Fire is an important part of the disturbance regimes of northwestern US forests and its role in maintaining and altering forest vegetation is evident in the paleoecological record of the region. Long-term reconstructions of Holocene fire regimes, provided by the analysis of charcoal, pollen, and other fire proxies in a network of lake records, indicate that the Pacific Northwest and summer-dry regions of the northern Rocky Mountains experienced their highest fire activity in the early Holocene (11,000-7000 years ago) and during the Medieval Warm Period (ca. 1000 years ago) when drought conditions were more severe than today. In contrast, in summer-wet areas of the northern Rocky Mountains, the period of highest fire activity was registered in the last 7000 years when dry woodland vegetation developed. When synthesized across the entire northwestern US, the paleoecological record reveals that past and present fire regimes are strongly controlled by climate changes occurring on multiple time scales. The scarcity of fires in the 20th century in some northwestern US ecosystems may be the result of successful fire suppression policies, but in wetter forests this absence is consistent with long-term fire regime patterns. In addition, simulations of potential future climate and vegetation indicate that future fire conditions in some parts of the northwestern US could be more severe than they are today. The Holocene record of periods of intensified summer drought is used to assess the nature of future fire-climatevegetation linkages in the region. #

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References (62)

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  62. Azimuth to Lake Michigan: r = -0.558 Azimuth to Lake Michigan: r = -0.558

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Richard Brugam

2016

In the late 18 th and 19th centuries the US Federal Government established the Public Land Survey (PLS) to survey the lands west of the original thirteen states and to sell it to settlers. The surveyors identified and measured diameter and distance of trees from section corners, as well as diameters of some trees on section lines across the landscape. Treeless areas were simply labelled "prairie". Ecologists have used this record to reconstruct forests everywhere west of the original 13 states before settlement. We used a Geographic Information System (GIS) and the PLS to explore the relationship among fire frequency, topography, and soils in Greene, Jersey and Macoupin Counties in SW Illinois. The PLS data was digitized from microfiche copies of the original notebooks archived in the Lovejoy Library at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Maps of tree distributions showed clear differences based on topography. The floodplains along the Illinois River supported a fire-intolerant forest of Salix sp., Populus deltoides, Acer spp., and Fraxinus spp. located on frequently flooded soils. The floodplain is bordered by a line of bluffs which forms a region of broken topography supporting moderately fire tolerant species -especially Quercus alba, Quercus velutina and Carya spp. These existed on alfisols with little prairie. To the East lay a region of mixed prairie and forest. The prairie was located on flat land and mollic soils where it was intermixed with the forest located on hillier slopes. The forest areas supported a highly fire tolerant forest including Quercus palustris, Quercus stellata and Quercus marilandica on alfisols. These observations are supported by measuring distances from the quarter section corners and diameters of trees. Fire-tolerant oaks were located far from the quarter section corners. Most also had large diameters. An exception was Quercus marilandica which forms fire tolerant "barrens" with small diameter, shrubby trees which are distant from quarter section corners. Non-Metric Multidimensional scaling is an ordination technique which reveals a close relationship among topography, vegetation and soils. Upland oak woodlands are located on alfisols which are indicative of forests. Prairies are located on

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Fire Season and Dominance in an Illinois Tallgrass Prairie Restoration
Henry Howe

Restoration Ecology, 2002

Growing-season fire is of interest because it suppresses dominant late-flowering grasses and forbs, thereby making available light and other resources used by subdominant grasses and forbs that comprise most prairie diversity. Here we report a twofold increase in mean frequency and richness of subdominant species after latesummer fire. Stimulation of subdominants was indiscriminate; richness of prairie and volunteer species increased in species that flowered in early, mid-, or late season. Early spring fire, the management tool used on this site until this experiment, had no effect on subdominant richness or frequency. Neither burn treatment affected reproductive tillering of the tallgrasses Sorghastrum nutans or Panicum virgatum . Flowering of Andropogon gerardii increased 4-fold after early-spring fires and 11-fold after late-summer fires. These preliminary results suggest that frequency and species richness of subdominants can be improved by late growing-season fire without compromising vigor of warm-season tallgrasses.

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Analysis of Historical Vegetation Patterns in the Eastern Portion of the Illinois Lesser Shawnee Hills
Roger C. Anderson

2011

We used General Land Office Survey (GLO) records to reconstruct the historical (1806-1810) vegetation of the eastern portion of the unglaciated Lesser Shawnee Hills Ecoregion of the Shawnee National Forest Purchase Area in southern Illinois. Prairies occurred on 0.4 percent of the area and savannah, open forest, and closed forest occupied 14.5 percent, 25.4 percent, and 59.6 percent of the area, respectively. Average tree density and basal area for the area were 102 trees per ha and 13 m2/ha, respectively. Closed forest occurred at significantly lower elevation than savannah, with average elevation being 139.3 m and 147.1 m for closed forest and savannah, respectively. White oak (Quercus alba) and black oak (Q. velutina) were the two leading dominant species in all vegetation categories. Savannah had higher importance of xeric species than did closed forest, whereas mesophytic species had higher Importance Values in closed forest. Variation in fire frequency, topography, and moistur...

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