Tallgrass Prairie Ecosystem

The tallgrass prairie is a diverse grassland ecosystem native to North America, characterized by deep-rooted grasses, forbs, and legumes that evolved with periodic fire disturbance. The chapter opens with a vivid description of prairie fire and the ecosystem's remarkable regeneration - green shoots emerging from root crowns within a week, pasque flowers blooming where bare ground receives sunlight.

The prairie demonstrates all key biodiversity-stability mechanisms: portfolio effects (16+ species varying only 15% year-to-year vs. monocultures varying 60%), functional complementarity (legumes fix nitrogen, deep-rooted forbs access subsoil water, early-season bloomers capture spring light), and response diversity (during the 2012 drought, big bluestem struggled while little bluestem and sideoats grama thrived). The Cedar Creek experiments used prairie plots to demonstrate that diverse systems maintain 65% productivity during severe drought while monocultures average 25%.