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Planted Grasslands And Native Sod Prairie: Equivalent Habitat For Grassland Birds, Kristel K. Bakker, Kenneth F. Higgins

Natural Resource Management Faculty Publications

Little is known about how avian relationships to tracts of native sod prairie compare with avian relationships to single and multiple species of cool- and warm-season grassland plantings. We compared grassland bird species richness and density in 5 grassland cover types (n = 97) in the tallgrass prairie region of eastern South Dakota and western Minnesota, 2001–2004. Grassland bird species richness was significantly higher in native sod prairies than it was in all planted cover types except warm-season mixes. Grasslands dominated by exotic species did not support as many grassland bird species or have species densities as high as grasslands …