The U-S is home to nearly five-thousand non-native plant species. Most aren’t considered harmful, but there are efforts to eliminate invasive ones from national parks. The National Park Service is working with a team at South Dakota State University to help restore native grasses and wildflowers at NPS sites in the northern Great Plains region. Federal staff will be in charge of removing invasive varieties.
Lora Perkins, who leads the Native Plant Initiative at SDSU, says they’ll focus on plant restoration with seed handling and harvesting techniques.
“National parks are like our public land heritage, right? We want these to be the healthiest landscapes that they can be, and native plants are a big part of that.”
Perkins says it isn’t enough for government and academic teams to prioritize these initiatives, suggesting private landowners can join the movement, too.
“Especially in the northern Great Plains, so much of our land is owned by private people – we don’t have a whole lot of public lands.”
Invasive plants can outgrow native plants and suppress them, negatively affecting surrounding wildlife. Perkins says what stands out about this project is that they’ll research the effectiveness of reintroducing native plants. She says those results could be replicated by others who want to do restoration work for other grassland areas.
Perkins says farmers and ranchers can do their part by planting native species – or at least managing their land in a way that creates a better environment for them. And, she says, homeowners can do things like including native wildflowers in yards and gardens.
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