To Log This Cache:
1) What type of prairie is located here?
2) What makes the prairie important to this location?
3) Estimate the height of the grass.
4) Take a selfie or group pic at ground zero or nearby. If you do not want to be in the pic, take an original one.
The Lesson:
The parent material of most prairie soil was distributed during the last glacial advance that began about 110,000 years ago. The glaciers expanding southward scraped the landscape, picking up geologic material and leveling the terrain. As the glaciers retreated about 10,000 years ago, they deposited this material in the form of till. Wind-based loess deposits also form an important parent material for prairie soils.
Fun Fact!
Much of a prairie is found underground! Prairie plants have deep, massive roots that absorb nearly all available water. Some roots can be three times longer than the plant above them!
Why are prairies important?
Prairies are vital ecosystems.
Many native animal species depend on these habitats for survival, from birds and insects to reptiles and mammals.
This complex ecosystem also plays an important role in capturing and storing carbon.
The long roots of prairie grasses reach deep underground and structure and nourish the soil and prevent erosion. Some plants have roots that extend a whopping 12 to 15 feet down.
When some of these roots die and decompose, the large amounts of organic matter help create rich, fertile soil.
Tallgrass prairie, sometimes called true prairie, is found in the eastern, more humid region of the prairie that borders deciduous forest. The rich soil is laced with the deep roots of sod-forming tallgrasses such as big bluestem and prairie cordgrass, or slough grass, in the wet lowlands and the shorter roots of bunchgrasses such as needlegrass, or porcupine grass, and prairie dropseed on the drier upland sites.
A mixed-grass prairie (midgrass prairie) is a grassland where grasses of many different heights grow. Mixed-grass prairies are the transition between eastern tall-grass prairies, where more rainfall means that taller grasses can grow, and western short-grass prairies, where the dry environment favors shorter grasses. In mixed-grass prairies, such as the grasslands surrounding Badlands National Park, grasses can range in height from ankle-high to waist-high.
The shortgrass prairie is an ecosystem located in the Great Plains of North America. The two most dominant grasses in the shortgrass prairie are blue grama and buffalograss, the two less dominant grasses in the prairie are greasegrass and sideoats grama. The prairie was formerly maintained by grazing pressure of American bison, which is the keystone species. Due to its semiarid climate, the shortgrass prairie receives on average less precipitation than that of the tall and mixed grass prairies.