Preserving the Tallgrass Prairie 

bruh just 2 likes in 7 years?

+tgifford lightning

Before humans it was underneath a mile of ice.

Without humans clearing large sections of land, building roads everywhere, and actively suppressing fires, lightning preceding thunderstorms would ignite dead material. Also, during severe droughts the plant material can become so dry that the sun's rays can ignite it. Native Americans also lit fires themselves for thousands of years because they realized its importance and they found that they could control these effects by controlling the fire. With the level of development that we have now, nature is at a major disadvantage. Even if a fire begins in one area due to lightning, it will reach a road and burn out much sooner than it naturally would, meaning most acreage is unburned, most of the time. We, as property owners, must manage our own mini prairies and be very hands on.

tgifford, likely far better than with humans in the mix to mess things up. Nature has a a remarkable way of establishing balance on her own.

Far more herbivores. Also there were herbivores so large they could mechanically take out the trees. Look up Paul Martin's Twilight of the Mammoths.

I thought if you burn in fall, you encourage cool weather grass, if you burn in spring, you encourage warm season grass.

Mob grazing doesn't replace fire. Natural grassland ecosystems have both.

In the first 15 seconds he tells you the key to the problem: "The bison roamed FREE..." Cattle, allowed to roam free like bison, won't really do any more damage than bison. Pen up a herd of buffalo, limit their grazing range by artificial means, and you will get the same destruction. It's the freedom to roam that is necessary to prevent the damage, and in our world of fences and boundaries, that is highly unlikely to happen. Sad but true.

Truly responsible cattle rearing requires a lot of land per head. We, as a society value access to beef higher than we value the land the cattle are raised on...which is backwards and sad.

There are not sufficient native species capable of maintaining a forest ecosystem of the same biodiversity as prairie ecosystems in the central US, where our tall, short, and mixed grass prairies reside. You are suggesting that we degrade our land further and produce less biodiversity (encouraging mass disease die offs) to forest the area...for what? YOUR aesthetic preferences? Perhaps, you could gain more appreciation my researching just how diverse our prairies are and visiting a few.

@@thomasclark7383 Well gee, trees actually protect the prairie. They were planted en masse to act as wind breaks to help prevent the prairies top soil from taking flight during the dust bowl. Not to mention tree roots are great at holding soil as they are extensive. Trees are also mast producing as in the produce fruit and nuts. Oh, not, that can't benefit wildlife. Hardwood trees produce fall color and are the largest flowering plants on earth.

@@Jemalacane0 This is old, but the prairies were gone by then. It was farm land, land that had been stripped of the prairie, broke and planted with crops. The destruction began once the government incented people to destroy it.

I can't comprehend with how naïve and downright idiotic this comment is.