Remnant Savanna and Grassland Restoration in the Mid-Atlantic Piedmont

Since 2019 we have been working on restoring an overgrazed cattle pasture into a diverse native grassland. In collaboration with Virginia Working Landscapes and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, we designed an experiment to test the effects of four ways of establishing native plants and two ways (mowing and burning) of maintaining a grassland. Native grasslands take a long time to reestablish themselves, but five years in we are starting to have an understanding of how to restore grasslands in the Piedmont region and what happens when we recreate the habitat that used to be much more widespread in our region. In this Zoom presentation, Co-Director Bert Harris, Ph.D., gave an update on what we’ve learned from the grassland restoration experiment so far and where we’re going next.