In a 2018 study published in Basic and Applied Ecology, Victoria Coffey and Rafael Otfinowski found that prairie land in Canada’s Riding Mountain National Park that once held spruce plantations didn’t come close to resembling untouched prairie 19 years after the trees were removed. Most of us think mistakes can be undone. You delete a file, you fix it; you spill your coffee, you clean it. Nature doesn’t always work like that.
Various fescue prairies in the park in Manitoba were transformed into white spruce plantations between 1928 and 1950, according to the research. Fescue prairie is a rare type of land, and the researchers believe that nowadays it occupies less than 5 percent of its original habitat in North America . A total of 131 plant species were recorded. However, none of the cleared plots resembled the undisturbed prairie plot, even after 19 years of clearing the trees. There was an increase in plant diversity followed by a decline over the 19 years studied.
Because a grassland is a living system with its own plants, seeds, and soil life, it just shows that place matters. Some trees were later taken out of some places to give the prairie space to regenerate itself. Weedy species increased following the removal of the trees. Native species decreased, whereas exotic and invasive species increased. Rough fescue, the defining grass of the prairie, was absent in all the cleared plots. The authors also found that the seed bank did not match the vegetation above ground, which made natural recovery difficult. The authors conclude that tree removal alone is not enough to restore northern fescue prairies. Low-variety plant communities can persist and block recovery without active management. Most people think of tree planting as an easy way to help the planet. The study isn’t saying tree planting is bad. This was only one site in one park, so the results may not apply everywhere. But the message is useful for anyone who cares about nature: fixing a landscape can take far more than undoing the original change.
It was an attempt to make up for trees that were logged before the park was created. In simple terms, the land did not simply revert to how it looked before the trees.
