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Grassland Bird Responses To Bison And Prescribed Fire Disturbances At Nachusa Grasslands And Kankakee Sands, Antonio Del Valle Jan 2022

Grassland Bird Responses To Bison And Prescribed Fire Disturbances At Nachusa Grasslands And Kankakee Sands, Antonio Del Valle

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Grazing from native herbivores such as bison (Bison bison), in combination with prescribed fire, are applied to tallgrass prairies by managers to recreate important disturbance patterns in this ecosystem. Bird communities may be indirectly impacted by these disturbances through their direct impact on plants that provides critical breeding habitat for grassland birds. The objectives of this research are to determine the impacts that bison and prescribed fire have on grassland breeding birds in two tallgrass prairie preserves, Kankakee Sands and Nachusa Grasslands. Birds, vegetation structure, and bison activity were surveyed systematically at these two preserves in 2020 and 2021. Prescribed …


Dataset For: Mapping Fire History And Quantifying Burned Area Through 35 Years Of Prescribed Fire History At An Illinois Tallgrass Prairie Restoration Site Using Gis, Erin G. Rowland-Schaefer, Elizabeth M. Bach, Bill P. Kleiman, Holly P. Jones Jan 2022

Dataset For: Mapping Fire History And Quantifying Burned Area Through 35 Years Of Prescribed Fire History At An Illinois Tallgrass Prairie Restoration Site Using Gis, Erin G. Rowland-Schaefer, Elizabeth M. Bach, Bill P. Kleiman, Holly P. Jones

Research Datasets

Fire was important to pre-colonization prairies. In today’s remnant and reconstructed prairies, managers frequently employ prescribed fire, a historical management practice that limits woody encroachment, suppresses non-native species, and promotes nutrient cycling. However, few long-term prescribed fire spatial datasets are available for study. We used archived images of prescribed fire maps and hand-drawn fire records to generate a geospatial record of the prescribed fire history at Nachusa Grasslands, a combination remnant and restored preserve in northern Illinois. This record contains maps of the prescribed fire history of the preserve across the entirety of its 35-year history. We used the maps …