Restoring and rebuilding native prairies
By Kristin Bryant
One quarter—or 15-million acres—of Missouri was considered a prairie prior to European settlement. To narrow the focus even further, nearly 50,000 acres, or 17 percent, of St. Louis County was covered with tall-grass prairie during that same time period.* Today, only 4 percent of the original prairies in Missouri have survived, and all of the prairies in the county have disappeared. You may be asking, “How could we allow this to happen?” and more importantly, “How can we reverse the effects of colonization and urbanization to bring back prairies?” In order to restore and rebuild prairies, it is necessary to understand their importance and history.
Prairie History
St. Louis County was a major crossroads of natural biomes found in the state of Missouri. Prairies, savannas, wetlands, and woodlands made up four dominant natural communities with prairies located in the east-central and northern portion of the county. Native Americans had settled in this area for thousands of years prior to Europeans, due to the land’s rich, natural assortment of buffalo, prairie chickens, ducks and geese, deer, and fish. As a tool to clear the land for farming, drive game, protection and ease of travel, Native Americans set fire to the land. As settlers began to move into the area, land fires became restricted, and the prairies and savanna that once occupied the areas were slowly taken over by woodlands. As time went by and more people made their way west, land became scarce as new dwellings were built. The last prairie in the county survived until the 1980s. “St. Louis County has lost all of its historical thousands of acres of prairie, but that does not mean we can’t re-construct this beautiful landscape and regain some of the lost diversity,” said Dennis Hogan, Environmental Resource Specialist for St. Louis County Parks. “We will never witness the dance of the prairie chicken in St. Louis County; we are 170 years too late. But we can provide essential habitat for other grassland birds, pollinators, and the migrating monarch butterflies.”