Document Type

Thesis - Open Access

Award Date

1972

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department / School

Botany

Abstract

In the late 1960's and early 1970's there arose an increased awareness of the ecological relationships of nature to man. Although this relationship has been known for some time and numerous books have been written on the subject, public awareness has been slow in coming. But for some unknown reason man has taken a turn to nature. He is becoming more involved with conservation of nature and appreciative of its aesthetic beauty. With this new awareness there has come a new era of camping, hiking, and riding, to mention only a few activities which man needs or wants to enable him to enjoy his new relationship with nature. As strange as it may seem, one of these new interests is the prairie. In his awareness, man now has become concerned over his management of the prairie and now is looking at its aesthetic beauty, historical dialog, and restoration. If the prairies are to be restored or prairie plants used for landscaping and other commercial uses, there will be a large demand for· seed from forbs which does not exist in sufficient quantity at the present time. This seed source must come from the small relict areas which still possess a gene pool representative of the native prairie. Jenkins points out that in any natural community there are a few dominant species which are very abundant and a large number of species which are more or less rare. In a prairie in Wisconsin, with 240 species present, 12 species were represented by as many individual plants as all the other 228 species combined. It is these 228 species, the majority of which are forbs, that this thesis is concerned about. Extensive research has been done on the grasses of the prairie, and these grasses can be established with relative ease compared to the forbs. Essentially no research has been done with forbs in· comparison to prairie grasses. The objectives of this thesis are twofold: (1) to determine the germination potential of several native prairie forbs, and (2) to determine the vegetative propagation potential of several native prairie forbs.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Prairies
Plant propagation

Format

application/pdf

Number of Pages

54

Publisher

South Dakota State University

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