Shelby Erickson

Minnesota is home to the temperate grassland biome, characterized by prairies that provide many important ecosystem services to the surrounding areas. However, many prairies have become severely fragmented as land changes have shifted from prairie to agricultural use. This fragmentation has detrimental effects on prairie composition and function which ultimately harms those that utilize prairie resources. Additionally, seeding has been utilized as a management strategy to help fragmented areas recover. In this study, I attempted to discover the relationship between floral resources, mainly floral area and floral abundance, and habitat fragmentation as well as the addition of seed. It was found that floral area resources increased significantly in plots with greater fragmentation and species were most abundant in the 95% fragmented plots. There was also a visible tradeoff between floral area and floral abundance. Species that were abundant during their blooming season did not have as large of floral area and species that had larger floral areas were not as abundant during their blooming season. Additionally, seeding had a limited and statistically insignificant impact on floral resources under all degrees of fragmentation. A possible future direction for this experiment could be to investigate the relationship between specific species that contribute to high floral area or high abundance and key prairie pollinators.