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Comparisons Of Plant Species Richness, Relative Abundance, And Diversity In Two Prairie Restorations And Two Remnant Prairie Preserves In Stearns County, Minnesota, Christopher J. Thompson

Honors Theses, 1963-2015

Prairies once covered vast areas of the Midwestern United States. In Minnesota, less than one percent of the state's original eighteen million acres of prairie remains. Restoration of prairie vegetation has become a popular means of augmenting preservation efforts and increasing the area of this rare native habitat. In this study I used species-area and rank abundance relationships to compare the species richness and diversity of restored prairies at St. John's University and Sand Prairie to remnant prairie preserves at Roscoe and Sand Prairie (all in Stearns County, Minnesota). I visually estimated relative abundance at each site using randomly placed …