The Investigation of Restoration Techniques for Two Degraded Rangeland Sites in North Dakota

Abstract

Vast areas of rangeland have been degraded or lost to row crop agriculture and urban development in the United States since European colonization. Two projects were undertaken to investigate strategies to improve diversity and forage production, while reducing invasive species on degraded prairie and also the revegetation of prairie susceptible to erosion. The projects sought to determine the effects of several pre-seeding burn and herbicide treatments paired with the interseeding of native species and to develop a seed mixture that is effective for restoring highly erodible areas devoid of vegetation. Results indicate that treatments pre-treated with herbicide have significantly higher biomass production and diversity along with a lower abundance of introduced species than the control. A seed mix selected for sites subject to high erosion paired with a topsoil layer addition resulted in higher native species richness, native species percent cover, and lower introduced species percent cover than the control.