Bringing Back Eastern Grasslands: A Restoration Across 35 National Parks

Staff of New River Gorge National Park and Preserve and the Southeastern Grasslands Institute evaluate grassland restoration at the park. NPS / Casey Reese.

A vanishing ecosystem

Park Service ecologist Dr. Dorothy Borowy calls grasslands by far the most critically imperiled ecosystem in the United States. Since European colonization, more than 90 percent of North America's grasslands have been turned to other uses.

With money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, the National Park Service is restoring grasslands in 35 parks from Mississippi to Maine. Often overlooked, eastern grasslands are the most biodiverse ecosystem in North America, sheltering and feeding pollinators and wildlife. Their loss has a domino effect, Borowy explains: plants underpin most food webs, so fewer kinds of plants means fewer insects, birds, small mammals and predators.

People depend on grasslands too. They hold about 34% of the world's land carbon, limit soil erosion, improve water quality, reduce runoff into streams, and offer recreation. And they carry history: remnant grasslands survive on Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields, and Indigenous peoples used and managed them for hunting and gathering, ceremony and medicine.

Grassland restoration at Malvern Hill, Richmond National Battlefield Park, Virginia. NPS / Casey Reese.

Four stages

Park Service regional biologist Casey Reese, who manages the effort across three regions, describes it in stages:

1. Pre-intervention — gathering data on what's there: which species are native, which invasive, which could thrive.
2. Site preparation — clearing invasive plants, trees and shrubs that crowd out native grasses, with herbicide, prescribed fire and mechanical removal. Deanna Boensch, natural resource program manager for the Natchez Trace Parkway, says this step decides whether a site succeeds.
3. Planting — each site gets its own mix of native seed, adapted to local conditions, able to cope with future climate, and reflecting the land's history. Reese says the team weighs natural and cultural goals together, including what history the seed mix should highlight.
4. Monitoring and care — prescribed fire, mowing and continued invasive removal keep the grassland healthy.

On historic landscapes such as battlefields, cultural landscape management protects a place's physical character and historic use; small changes, such as mowing later, can protect grassland birds while keeping that balance. On the Natchez Trace, which follows an ancient trail through many ecosystems and cultural sites, Boensch finds natural and cultural resources impossible to separate.

The Southeastern Grasslands Institute provides technical expertise and historical knowledge to return lands to grasslands like those of 300 years ago. Its director of ecological restoration, Jeremy French, notes that besides planting thousands of acres, the work is uncovering ancient grassland remnants in the parks — degraded but biodiverse, home to state and globally rare plants, whose local genetics are key to restoring eastern grasslands.

Natural resource manager Joe Calzarette and biologist Sarah Brown at Antietam National Battlefield, Maryland. NPS / Casey Reese.

The goal

The projects aim to treat 4,000 acres, benefiting more than 10,000 acres of parkland — changes that will be large but gradual. Reese hopes one day to look over fields now in corn and soybeans and see meadows full of birds and butterflies, a better experience for visitors and better care for history. Borowy describes it as giving land stripped of its ecological value a biodiversity uplift, valuable to wildlife, visitors and future stewards.

The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law fund resilience and restoration work across the National Park System.

Sources

Based on Clara Deforest Colvig, "Restoring essential grasslands in the East" (July 2024), National Park Service; published by the National Park Service. The author worked for the Park Service through a Conservation Legacy placement, and the quotations of Park Service staff and of the Southeastern Grasslands Institute are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The author's portrait is not reproduced.