We wanted to see if the plant species and their abundance differed between the three sowing treatments, and also whether it changed over the years.  What is the best way to do this?  Our approach was to set up four permanent 1 m x 1 m plots with each of the 18 large plots—groups of scientists have visited these same plots over and over across the years to keep track of what plants were present and how common they were.  Thanks to Bryan Foster, Sheena Parsons, Naomi Betson and many others at the Kansas Biological Survey and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (University of Kansas), we have taken detailed plant data every year from 2014 to the present in these plots.  

 

How are data collected?  Researchers who really know plant identification carefully look through each plot and identify all the plant species.  For each plant, they also estimate how common they are.  For example, if a big bluestem plant takes up one fourth of the plot, it has 25% “cover.”  

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Data from these permanent vegetation plots have been used in many research projects at Free State Prairie, and these data will become even more valuable as the years go by.