Patty Loew:
This week we begin with a report out on the prairie. Deep in the heart of our capitol city. The 1260 acre University of Wisconsin arboretum is an oasis of nature in an urban setting. Not only the oldest but the most extensive collection of restored ecosystems in the United States. "In Wisconsin" reporter Liz Koerner shows you how it started 75 years ago as an experiment and the research continues to this day in Madison.

Man:
I want to see if you can notice the smell that we have coming from here. That nice, pleasant kind of smell. Kind of a buttery smell.

Liz Koerner:
The scents and sights found here were nearly lost to history. Curtis Prairie stretches over 60 acres in the heart of the university arboretum in Madison. It has the distinction of being the oldest prairie restoration in the world.

Jim FitzGibbon:
The most beautiful things about it are very small. You have to come close and take a look at the little flowers. The history of it goes back of course thousands of years when it used to be an oak opening. Then it was disrupted by human activity.

Liz Koerner:
This land south of Lake Wingra was disrupted by farming before the university bought it in the 1930s. It was here that the arboretum founders set out on an inspired experiment. Aldo Leopold, remembered now for his writings about a land ethic, was one of them.

Kevin McSweeney:
It was articulated in Aldo Leopold's speech in 1934 at the dedication of the arboretum where he expressed this vision of recreating representative ecosystems of Wisconsin in one place and so this was a fairly revolutionary vision.

Liz Koerner:
It was revolutionary because they wanted to roll back time on this former farm, something that had never been attempted before. It was a trial and error process and sometimes they got it right on the first try. Joy Zedler is a professor of botany at the university and heads up restoration research.

Joy Zedler:
The first lesson is that planting entire sods of prairie from sites that were destined for destruction was more effective in establishing native plants than either bringing in, let's say hay, from a mowed natural prairie or seeds that were collected.

Liz Koerner:
They had to scavenge these clumps of sod from out of the way places like railroad right of ways and took advantage of the youthful energy of the civilian conservation corps for the heavy lifting. Another lesson learned over time was how to use fire to keep the prairie from losing out to encroaching trees.

Joy Zedler:
We are on the forest-prairie border. So in this region it's fairly well understood that Native Americans were using fire and that fire was a frequent part of the natural landscape. Fire was an obvious restoration tool to favor the development of prairie instead of woodland.

Liz Koerner:
75 years after setting out on this restoration experiment researchers are still carrying out studies in Curtis prairie investigating things like climate change and pollinating insects. Even the impact of road salt.

Joy Zedler:
All of those things have monetary value. People care about those things.

Liz Koerner:
One study is trying to answer the question, will more plant diversity provide more benefits to humans?

Joy Zedler:
So I thought Curtis Prairie would be a great place to test that idea and have found willing students to participate.

Liz Koerner:
Graduate student Jim Doherty is one of them.

Jim Doherty:
I'm going to pick a set area to just lay down a sample frame and within that I'll identify the species, count how many there are and then make an estimate of their cover. Then I will analyze it from about 60 plots within this prairie and try to discern some relationship between the diversity and the productivity.

Liz Koerner:
Another research project is aimed at answering questions about a growing problem in Curtis Prairie. It's an invasive species called reed canary grass.

Joy Zedler:
It's Wisconsin's worst wetland weed because of the extent of the area it dominates. Some 500,000 acres of Wisconsin wetlands are dominated by this plant.

Liz Koerner:
To understand this acreage, take Lake Winnebago and multiply the surface area by 3.6. That's the current acreage of reed canary grass in Wisconsin.

Joy Zedler:
So it is a plant that is worthy of control not only because it spreads rapidly but because the plants that live with it, the native species, are rapidly eliminated.

Liz Koerner:
Their initial research proved that reed canary grass grows better than native grass given certain conditions: shallow flooding with water that brings along topsoil and other nutrients like storm water.

Woman:
I'm standing in a creek bed for storm water that has developed in Curtis Prairie.

Liz Koerner:
Storm water that pours into the arboretum has increased over time. It now averages almost half a billion gallons a year. To address the invasion of reed canary grass Zedler first needs to figure out where that water flows.

Joy Zedler:
We don't really understand how much of Curtis Prairie is wet either historically or as the result of inflowing storm water. Madeline Fisher is a research associate with us and she is mapping the canary grass as one indicator of where we have wetlands and three other species as well.

Madeline Fisher:
I'm looking for places where these plants are 75% of the coverage or greater so they are basically areas where these plants dominate and I'm walking along the edge and taking a GPS reading every 15 feet or so to be able to map their distribution so the arboretum can see how the distribution is changing.

Liz Koerner:
There are other experiments in Curtis Prairie attempting to learn how to control reed canary grass and other invasive species. Along the way it's certain that less aggressive native plants will be lost. The work today is not about returning to the past.

Kevin McSweeney:
Rather we need to try and think of the ecosystem functions that we consider desirable for a healthy urban and rural landscape.

Liz Koerner:
Zedler and others continue to work toward that goal improvising and improving on the experiment known as Curtis Prairie.

Joy Zedler:
We see Curtis Prairie as unique. It is a special place. It's where the arboretum began and looking back now, not just to the 1960s, but to 1934, 1935 when the arboretum was designated as a research and teaching area, I can see that it was way ahead of its time.

Patty Loew:
Research done over the years in Curtis Prairie is applied in many areas around the world and throughout Wisconsin. Russ Hefty is the director of Madison's Conservation Parks, including Cherokee Marsh. He talks about some of the lessons learned from arboretum research in our web extra. To view it log onto our website at wpt.org and click on “In Wisconsin” for his comments and some beautiful footage of that prairie restoration.