We’ve now plugged most of the holes in the documentation about how the Remnant Prairies online tools work. Check out in particular the Prairie Assessment section, and please post in the comments any things you find unclear or missing.

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We’re in the process of making some major updates to the Remnant Prairies web site. In addition to the new focus and look, we’ve substantially updated our online tools.

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Our brief trial allowing anonymous visitors to experiment with the various Location tools (including FQA calculations) has come to a not-unexpected halt. Whether trolls or automated bots, someone/something has been stuffing bogus information and links into the various fields of the Konza Prairie demo location. This is entirely unacceptable.

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As we explain in this article, Floristic Quality Assessment (FQA) calculations are location-specific. A plant that is endemic and valuable in one location may be a noxious weed in another. Hence FQA studies only make sense when the calculations are done using coefficient of conservatism (CoC) values for the particular location of interest.

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Because of the substantial and evolving number of prairie organizations and projects out there, we’ve moved our listings from a static page into a database-driven section: Organizations.

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Since our current efforts are taking a rather more quantitative direction, we’ve put up some additional background documentation that we hope will be useful, mostly accurate, or at least not flagrantly misleading.

• How Prairies Are Assessed With FQAs explains what FQA is, how it’s done, and some issues about doing it
• Monitoring and Measuring Plant Communities is a quick summary of methodological issues used by ecologists

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We’ve just added a new detailed FAQ about how to use the new Location tools and particularly the procedures for managing Floristic Quality Assessment (FQA) data. Since these tools accomplish nontrivial tasks, there is no way to make them completely effortless. There are some basic concepts that you need to understand — and this FAQ explains them.

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We’ve finally gotten around to adding some tools to the site that we’ve been thinking about for quite a while. These tools enable users to define areas of interest at a geographical location using a Google Maps-based mashup and to conduct floristic quality assessment studies on those areas.

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We’ve just learned of a great group operating in southern Illinois and Wisconsin — The Prairie Enthusiasts.

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It’s always exciting to see large herbivores restored to a prairie, and here’s the latest case. The Broken Kettle Grasslands managed by the Nature Conservancy in Iowa has just re-introduced 30 bison. Initially the bison will be held in a 125 acre “trap pasture” during the winter, but then they’ll have the rest of the grasslands 3000 acres to recreate in.

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In order to facilitate a current email discussion about how best to preserve and protect remnant prairies, we’ve launched this web site. It offers a variety of collaborative communication tools that we hope provide a more useful format for deliberation.

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