Go belowground: Researchers collaborate on the Great Plains

Photo Credit

USDA Forest Service Photo by Jackie Ott

Jitka illustrating and processing specimens from Broken Kettle Grassland Preserve. 

Most prairie plants place their resources for resprouting belowground, growing from buds rather than seeds. Buds occur on belowground structures called tubers, roots, and rhizomes. These structures help prairies to recover more rapidly following disturbances like grazing, fire, and drought.  

This May and June, a group of scientists from the Rocky Mountain Research Station and the Czech Academy of Science's Institute of Botany documented some of these important belowground plant structures on the Great Plains. Professor Jitka Klimešová at the Czech Academy of Science is the leading world expert in the field of belowground plant morphology and biology. She has teamed up with research ecologist Jackie Ott from the Rocky Mountain Research Station to share Ott's expertise in belowground bud banks.

Ott, Klimešová, and a team from the Czech Academy of Science have been visiting grasslands across the Great Plains to document the diversity of belowground plant structures. Over two years, they have collected, illustrated, and described the belowground structures of over 400 species. 

This year, the team had the privilege of working at the Treadwell Ranch in the Edwards Plateau region of Texas, the University of North Dakota in the northern Tallgrass Prairie, the University of Nebraska's Lincoln Gudmundsen Sandhills Laboratory, the Bessey Ranger District on the Nebraska National Forest and Grasslands in the Nebraska Sandhills, and The Nature Conservancy's Broken Kettle Grasslands Preserve in eastern Tallgrass Prairie.

These study areas represent grasslands that are vital to the Great Plains. The Nebraska Sandhills is one of the seven most intact grasslands remaining in the world and the Broken Kettle Grasslands Preserve is the largest contiguous prairie remaining in Iowa. The belowground structures of each species that were illustrated and described will be studied further by the Czech Academy of Science's lab. The team plans to release the illustrations and descriptions in scientific publications over the next several years.

Ott, Klimešová, and her team will continue to search belowground and invite others to take a closer look at the powerhouse structures of grassland plants the next time they are outside!