Dan Carter

@prairiebotanist.com

816 Followers 708 Following

Ecologist of Midwestern fire-dependent ecosystems & volunteer land steward @ Mukwonago River Oak Barrens. Opinions mine. Among them is the need to stop viewing grasslands, savannas, & woodlands through a productivist lens. Ban AI. He/Him

Dolemite outcrop with Smooth cliff-break fern with bluff prairie behind and an area of trees and a fair weather sky with puffy cumulus clouds in the background.
Lake Mead’s marina sitting far below the high water line, which creates a white bathoring below a brown desert landscape.
Primula fassettii with pink, nodding blossoms and erect developing seed capsules tucked into a little grotto weathered into a soft layer of limestone (broad sense) on a south-facing slope.
Sunny yellow flower of Hypoxis. The blossom has six petals and is about half an inch across.
View along the fire line of a prairie burn. The burn boss and an observer look on from a cultivated field with a UTV pump unit in the background. In the front foreground are flames, further back is smoke and blackened ground. All under a sunny blue sky.
Pale pink, six-petaled flowers of round-lobed hepatica flowering above last year's leaves, which have overwintered, moss, and dried blades of sedge from last year.
A ring of sprengel's sedge, with a few inges last year's dead foliage present, but it's distal tips have burned off along with oak leaf litter. The bases of the leaf blades remained green after the burn and overwinter, and new green shoots have just begun to grow. Fire did not reach the center of this clump, where some twigs and other debris remain.
Flanking fires converging towards the end of a prescribed burn of a fen and sedge meadow complex with reed canary grass around its periphery. Brown, particulate-laden smoke lofts downwind from right to left.
Smoke rises from fire passing under a large bur oak matriarch (5 feet in diameter)
Fire backs away from a mowed burn break through low, grassy/sedgy fuels. Smoke lofts and drifts to the right. In the background a crew member smothers fire along the firebreak with a flapper. Obscured by smoke, another crew member with a backpack water can observes.
Burn pile of glossy buckthorn, big logs from a planted Scots pine, and black cherry burning in a wooded area with snow covering the ground.
Screenshot of current weather conditions at the National Weather Service office located in Sullivan, WI (about 40 miles west of Milwaukee). It is -16F with a wind chill of -38F.
GFS 2 meter temperature model output showing a map of the southeastern United States for the morning of January 27. Temperatures between 0 and -20F cover a broad swath from E. Texas to coastal North Carolina and southern Ohio to central Alabama.
Frame of chicken wire over an asparagus bed with a sign on a wood frame above it that reads, "This is the awning of the cage of asparagus."
Map showing states I'd consider living in...West Coast, Upper Midwest (esp. MN), New England, New Mexico and Colorado. I'd be drawn to Iowa if it hadn't destroyed itself with its agriculture. Hardest no is Florida, but I have to admit to never having been there.
Dear Dousman Families, Back in September, Dousman Elementary and the PTO began communicating their interest in a one-book community read....Copies of the Wishtree were sent home ahead of time so families could decide how and when they wanted to participate. This activity was also planned alongside the school’s book fair to support a strong reading culture in the building. We have since received concerns about the book Wishtree.... As families began reading the book, three concerns were shared with the school or via social media. The first was the way the main character, a tree, introduces itself as biologically male and female. The second was the storyline involving a religious minority family experiencing discrimination. The third was that the tree describes keeping secrets, which some families felt sent a message that was not appropriate for a school wide read. Given the concerns that have been shared, the district is taking the time to look carefully at the book and its use in our schools. We take the concerns that families have raised seriously, and when questions arise about the appropriateness of a book or material, we use our established review process.... Wishtree will move into that formal review process. The outcome may include keeping the book with conditions, limiting its use to specific settings, or removing it as a district resource.... During the review, the book will not be used as a building wide selection.... We view this as an opportunity for the district, the school board, and our community to work together. We appreciate the feedback that families have offered. Families are an essential part of the education process and your input helps us ensure that materials are age appropriate, reflect community expectations, and support a positive learning environment. Thank you for your continued partnership. If you have questions or would like to discuss this further, please reach out.
Bright flame in the dark of late evening creep into the wind over fallen bur oak litter and short, herbaceous plants
Volunteers supervise fire a low line of fire as it creeps through bronze, crunch black and Hill's oak leaf litter.
View of recovering oak barrens at the Mukwonago River Oak Barrens with soft plumes of gray goldenrod (mostly, a little tall goldenrod up front), gold and red hues of uniform bristleberry, and mahogany and russet marcescent foliage of black oaks. All under a blue sky with a few puffy cumulus and lit by the low autumn sun.
A blue spotted salamander with light blue spots over a back background resting on some moist moss on the outide of the rotten wood where it was found.
Inflorescence of heath aster on left with small capitula with short rays and frost aster at right with larger capitula with longer rays.
Leadplant dying its slow death in the shade under ironwood and maple colonizing a sandy and rocky south slope in Vernon County, WI. Maple leaves litter the ground, because they are being shed early in response to a dry spell. Other prairie plants in the vicinity were hoary puccoon, purple prairie clover, side-oats grama, big bluestem, and thimbleweed.
Four-petaled flowers (just past blooming) borne oppositely along the upper portions of pale lavendar stems with very reduced leaves.
Enlarged “buds” or unopened capitula with enlarged involucres on heath aster
Thistle and me on her last day.
These pictures simply show a very good dog (a beagle mix) in happy places...on the trail and laying in the grass on a splendid spring day.
"This conceptual model generally applies to dry conifer forests in western North America, formerly red pine dominated forests in the southeastern boreal forest, and temperate broadleaf and conifer woodlands and forests of the eastern United States. Prior to ~1880, traditional burning and lightning-ignited fires contributed to an active historical fire regime with frequent, lower-severity fires that produced tree-ring fire scars, cumulatively burned a relatively large area, and maintained low fuel loads, thereby serving as a stabilizing (negative) feedback88. The gradual increase in annual area burned from 1600 to 1880 may have resulted from a warming climate at the end of the Little Ice Age136 and is generally based on Marlon et al.7, although this pattern may manifest due to reduced records in the earlier periods of analysis137. The onset of sustained fire exclusion and suppression over many decades reduced annual area burned, reflected by a decline in tree-ring fire scars, during which time fuel loads accumulated. At present, fires generally burn during pronounced droughts, increasing the area burned in recent years, although total area burned remains below historical levels. Contemporary fires in historically frequent fire forests now often act as a destabilizing (positive) feedback88, with tremendous social-ecological effects through smoke impacts, reduced community safety, and diminished forest recovery. The future is uncertain and depends on management actions, social decisions and priorities, and climate change. Figure credit: Jessie Thoreson."
Original land survey notes for the town (and county) line in this area that describes land: "Land except marsh rolloing second rate--bur, white, yellow, and black oak. Red root, rosin weed, etc."
Burn piles six to ten feet wide by five to six feet tall in the Carson national forest above Taos Ski Valley, with an average spacing propably around 25 ft. This goes on literally for miles from below the Ski Valley up almost to Bull of the Woods.
A cluster of three large, lush, cerulean Parry's gentian flowers opening into the sunshine.
Area of low prairie vegetation where tall goldenrod (Solidago altissima) and sawtooth sunflower (Helianthus grosseserratus) have been weakened by rope dodder (Cuscuta glomerata).
Map showing dewpoints and temperatures at varieous stations in NW Illinois. Most dewpoints are 80F or above, and temperatures are in the upper 80s to low 90s F. In Freeport the dewpoint is 85F!
Spiky foliage of a small clump of Minuartii michauxii growing out of the textured and complex surface of a soil biological crust.
A black, orange, and white patterned Baltimore Checkerspot buttefly spreads its wings while perched on upward-facing surface of a spotted Joe-Pye weed leaf.
Flower of Cleland's evening primrose (Oenothera clelandii) showing diamond shape petal and anthers and stigma exerted similarly vs. stigma exceding anthers as in Oenothera rhombipetala.
Rose glow of sunrise under dying showers over a northern Wisconsin lake
Hillsahde map showing broader context, drumlin fields to the northwest and NE, beds of old pro-glacial lakes, etc.
August, 1956 air photo from the Mukwonago River Corridor in the vicinity of the T/Eagle / T/Mukwonago line (the N/S fence line in this photo). The central area appears cropped (maybe spring wheat or barley?), but the cropped has differential ripening patterns (seen as light vs. dark) which reflect underlying geology. Soils are Chelse sand, but there appear to be underlying channels similar to what one migh see associated with an alluvial fan. Present vegetation is recovering black oak barrens. Species like Asclepias amplexicaulis, Asclepias viridiflora, Crocanthemum canadense, Lechea stricta, Hieracium longipilum, Liatris aspera, and Lithospermum caroliniense have spontaneously recolonized this area from edges following agricultural abandonment.
Vivid orange of butterfly milkweed and hundreds of pink pale purple coneflowers
Clusters of cylindrical green blooms on a vigorous clump of short green milkweed, with long, wavy-margined leaves that feel like plastic. Not in this short, but a bumblebee visited while I was taking this photo.
Vivid orange wood lilies flower in dry hill prairie on the bluff above the Mississippi
Asclepias purpurascens blooming after invasive brush removal and a burn through this prairie-woodland transition.
A dung beetle rolling a piece of deer dung, struggling, and briefly ending up on its back
Cutler Park in Waukesha
Nitrates occur naturally in soil, but in heavily agricultural states like Iowa, they also leach from manure and commercial fertilizer applied to farmland into rivers, lakes and streams, often via drainage tiles underlying fields. Fertilizers also can wash into waterways from urban sources like lawns and golf courses.
Edge of work area is a wall of hazel and small red maples. Girdled red maples and an old red pine in the foreground. I have cut and treated hazel but lately am finding deer browse of resprouts so severe that I can get away with not treating it, especially if I remove only a few hundred square feet at a time.
Planted prairie with abundant clumps of Junegrass, lupine in flower, golden Alexanders, rattlesnake master, showy goldenrod, prairie blazingstar, etc. Bravo! These plantings get burned often--that and good seed are why they are how they are, which is excellent.
Walking and talking through the Somme Prairie Grove...through a grove of oaks just before entering restored prairie/open savanna with abundant everything everywhere.
quarter meter quadrat frame with Orobanche circled, but also abundant Comandra umbellata, Helianthus occidentalis, a rosette of Cirsium pumilum var. hillii, some flowering Lithospermum canescens, and more.
Orobanche bloom peaking up through the prairie sod.
Yellow golden Alexanders and pink and white midland shooting stars flowering beneath broken stratocumulus on a cool day at Mounds View Grassland near Barneveld, WI
Dense comandra umbellata with Pedicularis canadensis, and scattered Liatris aspera, Primula meadia, Silphium laciniatum, etc. in planted prairie--not old-growth.
Spikes of Buxbaum’s sedge with characteristic dark maroon scales
Old-Groth Schurch Thomson Prairie at the Mounds View Grassland with bright yellow hoary puccoons, pale yellow wood beton, tall stalks of edible valerian flowers, and a drift of white and pale pink midland shooting star in the distance. The broader landscape shows a patchwork of old-growth and planted prairies and groves of bur oak.
Helianthus x laetiflorus…its leaves are more hispid below for one.