Life Sciences Commons^™

Documenting The Rapidly Expanding Distribution Of Invasive Ravenna Grass (Tripidium Ravennae) Eastern In Kansas, Rachel A. Styers

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

Invasive species cause significant ecological losses in the United States where they cost approximately $21 billion dollars a year to manage (Fantle-Lepczyk et al., 2022). Early detection of new invasive species, coupled with a rapid response of management efforts, can help to slow the ecological and economic impacts caused by these habitat invaders. Tripidium ravennae (L.) H. Scholz (or Ravenna grass) is a tall, robust, cespitose grass known to occur in Kansas, although its distribution remained poorly documented prior to this study. Given its known invasive tendencies, it has been declared noxious in at least six US states. Coupled with …

The Effects Of Clipping On The Biomass Production Of Native Warm Season Grasses On Reclaimed Abandoned Coal Mine Soils, James A K Daniel

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

THE EFFECTS OF CLIPPING ON THE BIOMASS PRODUCTION OF NATIVE

WARM SEASON GRASSES ON RECLAIMED

ABANDONED COAL MINE SOILS

James A K Daniel

Strip mining leaves behind highly disrupted plant and soil communities. Mined land reclamation returns the land back to a natural or economically usable state, however, reclamation cannot completely restore the soils to their original state. Subsequently, normal frequencies of management practices may not be as effective as in undisturbed soils. Understanding how the severity of soil disturbance affects plant production is important for habitat rehabilitation and determining effective management techniques to be implemented following reclamation. This project …

Floristic Survey Of Crawford And Cherokee Counties In Southeast Kansas: An Evaluation Of Change Over Five Decades, Samantha Pryer

Electronic Theses & Dissertations

This project had two main objectives. The first objective was to document comprehensively the vascular flora of Crawford and Cherokee counties in extreme southeast Kansas. Each county had seen limited collecting in recent decades, though a comprehensive survey had never been done for Cherokee County. PSU student E.S. Gibson summarized the flora for Crawford County in 1963. Fieldwork for the present study occurred mostly in 2014 and 2015. Based on 6500+ newly collected specimens, vouchers from Gibson’s study, and taxa documented by Biota of North America (BONAP) (Kartesz 2017), 1440 taxa are reported, which includes 33 state and 263 county …