Yeah, that is an absurd map and there never ever would have been tallgrass prairie if it were even remotely close.

Most of the plants people would find familiar are monecious. It's simply their biology. They are plants not humans. We aren't talking about penises and vaginas. Why must the idiotic concerns of bigoted morons govern us?

see Forgotten Fires: Native Americans and the Transient Wilderness by Omer Stewart. But also fire every 3-5 years leads to woody succession into prairie and savanna. And the fires that occur at that interval are too intense due to high fuel loads and cause lasting damage to fauna herbaceous flora.

Based on tree ring scars? Trees only record scars when fire is intense enough to damage them. But it's also not about the historical fire regime, it's about what stabilizes vs. destabilizes the ecosystem. Even in the south there are many accounts of fires being very frequent.

A lot of them don't lose their leaves to fire (if they are basal). They also get a long spring cool season to make some hay.

Where I'm referring to gets burned every year, almost always in fall, maybe once or twice in February.

because litter is the problem.

seem to do best on convex slopes and around bases of trees where litter blows away and fire often doesn't reach. Indeed kittentails, birds-foot violets, early buttercups, prairie larkspur, and many others have a lot of winter green, and fire (if frequent enough to be less intense) helps them,

Can't comment at the other place, around that burned sedge pictured, there is a bunch of woodland phlox. Yes, it's overwintering leaves get burned off, but it still does really well. Other things like round-lobed hepatica, which rely a lot on winter photosynthesis

In northern WI it grows in xeric oak-pine barrens. In SE WI it has more a tendency to grow in moist savanna transitions to wetlands--even sometimes rooting in histosols. Probably more to know there.

Well a lot is probably AI at this point. My partner is an NP and says that a lot of the rejections are just nonsensical.

Highly invasive Phragmites australis subsp. australis.

This almost certainly has relevance for invertebrates (research tends to lump all fire), plants, and soil biological crusts, and my guess is that they follow similar patterns and that this is some of why the most frequently dormant burned prairies are the most resistant to degradation.

*our* argh

I'll concede Iowa wouldn't be the literal stinking, toxic sewer it's become since I played in its cricks as a boy if it were a pasture where livestock were fenced from waterways, but a handful of counties in diverse cereal, legume, fruit, and vegetable production would feed us more and better.

Even our happiest beef is orders of magnitude worse than are unhappiest bean. Don't eat crickets. Give Rancho Gordo some business.

It's a classic win win where cows get grass and meadowlarks get something that's not corn or subdivisions, but biodiversity, land, climate (not just methane, but also nitrous oxide) still suffers.

Most of our most ecologically significant "protected" grasslands are in the production game, and they are DYING, at least compared to the few that aren't. But yeah, conventional corn is worse.