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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 30/09/2026

Man, hybrid cattail has destroyed connectivity between so many Midwestern lakes and adjacent wetlands and uplands. Pictured is Utica Lake, Waukesha County, WI with adjacent tamarack fen behind the cattails.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 30/09/2026

Time of year and shape…those help identify trees, so it makes sense.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 30/09/2026

These are haycocks in what is now the Scuppernong Habitat Area of the Kettle Moraine State Forest-South.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 30/09/2026

How do you tell a corn shock from a haycock?

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 28/09/2026

It’s also fundamental to long-term success in restoration—understanding impacts of actions on nutrient availability and to flora that have persistence strategies vs. opportunistic ones.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 28/09/2026

It’s fundamental to old growth biodiversity that there are many strategies for persisting in resource-limited environments, but few (get big fast) for bright environments awash in available nutrients.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 28/09/2026

Ancient grasslands, once destroyed, don’t grow the same plant species back www.nature.com/articles/d44.... We already knew this. There are whole organizations founded on this and which are aware of the mechanisms.

nature.com

Ancient grasslands, once destroyed, don’t grow the same plant species back

Recovering secondary grasslands have taller plants that can quickly absorb light and nutrients.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 28/09/2026

The way we’ve found to better approximate old growth involves growing Eurasian brome on the land for decades first before sowing old growth species, but taller grasslands are good and we don’t know yet what centuries will bring where dispersal can happen.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 27/09/2026

I pulled in the dock at the Bayfield County place. It was only in an inch of water due to drought, but it meant the mucky and sandy shore was growing cool stuff like Rhynchospora capitella.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 27/09/2026

Fine autumn day to dig a little more red-pine-oak savanna out of the maple-poplar-hazel thicket caused by poor forestry and fire exclusion.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 26/09/2026

So this a bigger thing apparently. I guess I’m out of touch.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 26/09/2026

Listening to WPR today? I thought the same thing. I don’t want to work for the sort of person that’d care.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 24/09/2026

I cut back ninebark yesterday so it wouldn't impinge on the fascist blue spruces next door. I was happy to be a good neighbor. The blue spruce will join our neighborhood's Rhizosphaera needle cast party soon enough.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 23/09/2026

Daylight savings also means I send kids to school in extra layers they only need on the bus, which they invariably leave somewhere.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 20/09/2026

Boo. Ethanol is an environmental catastrophe that only props up industrial ag and fossil fuel dependency.

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Reposted by Dan Carter

Nicolas Hénin @nicolashenin.net · 17/09/2026

Nice campaign by the Norwegian Consumer Council about the declining lifespan of products. Enjoy!

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 18/09/2026

I think there were some issues with the research, but I've been waiting for this, and I hope the trees truly are blight resistant.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 12/09/2026

In Wisconsin I've seen violet coral in a few places--all are acid sand that isn't dry. It's usually growing out of the ground, especially where there is a fair amount of moss cover. Goodyera pubescens, Carex gracillima, and Solidago patula are some of the nearby herbaceous plants in this case.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 12/09/2026

Violet coral (Clavaria amethystina...some new work suggest our Midwestern violet cor is not C. zollingeri). A visitor to the Mukwonago River Oak Barrens mentioned seeing this recently. We knew about it, but this year it is indeed very abundant there in wet-mesic sand under oak.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 11/09/2026

I wouldn’t vote for him. I DGAS anymore.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 06/09/2026

Honest question: Aren’t absentee/mail votes also often counted with the same machines? At my WI polling location I’m pretty sure volunteers are running absentee ballots through the machines between in-person, day of voters.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 03/09/2026

Man, I am out of touch. I had no idea people were using ChatGPT for navigation.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 30/08/2026

To “Google” used to mean search, but that had faded already. Now it means to lick boot or kiss ass.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 27/08/2026

Some stewards are operating in a world where this has been learned already, and they tend have success, but quite a few aren't, so this is good to see. This implies things about how old growth works and has worked. It reinforces why some practices are successful and others aren't.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 26/08/2026

This is already a core principle of our grassland and savanna stewardship, and it also informs what to not do when caring for these ecosystems, which is anything that favors opportunists.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 25/08/2026

Yeah, this is better I think. I mostly care about how fast I can find the notes, and I think it will be this, because it's easiest for me to find things spatially first with an air photo basemap.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 25/08/2026

Have not seen it, but I'm on it now.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 24/08/2026

The original land survey field note documents still seem to be there. This was the source I've relied on for Minnesota. Annoyingly, WI's are now on a UW library website without the nice interface that allowed users to click counties and townships to get direct links to each section line.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 11/08/2026

Yeah, and you know what? You put in place a moratorium until guardrails are in place to protect the public interest.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 07/08/2026

I like this discussion. For those of us that do what we can at home, it's good. It's very good, in fact, but there are limits. It doesn't approach the importance of protecting and sustaining (burning very often in the dormant season) the remnants. www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDVc...

youtube.com

How Prairie Fires Restore Water to Soil & Why Prairies Need to Burn

YouTube video by Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 07/08/2026

There are several springs like this in the fen, but the most voluminous everge from cobbles, the water having pushed out all of the sand and small pebbles.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 07/08/2026

We burned this fen in February for the 1st time in memory. The footprint of flowering Parnassia glauca (grass-of-Parnassus) extends farther away from the marl/gravel flats into the sedges this year, and Rhychospora alba (white beak-rush) is blooming, which I have never detected on previous visits.

White blossom with five white green-striped petals of grass-of-Parnassus with a small blue blossom of Kalm's lobelia.

Numerous white beak-rush growing among other sedges with Ohio goldenrod in yellow bud.

Sedge meadow attendant to the fen with abundant pink blossoms spotted Joe-Pye, white umbels of cowbane, and a yellow giant sunflower.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 04/08/2026

Right to repair applies across the board.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 02/08/2026

iNat suggests it may be further north, but lots of ticks get reported well away from where people picked them up, because people move about...drive up north for the weekend.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 02/08/2026

Well my son definately picked one up either in or back yard or along the Glacial Drumlin trail last week...first I've encountered in WI (I see A LOT of ticks), but I encountered many doing grad work in KS and OK, and I have the alpha gal allergy to go with it.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 31/07/2026

and when they need to be opposing EVERYTHING the right tries to move on right now.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 31/07/2026

You are not reeding the room. Democrats always need to fight--even when they don't have power. Lately, I expect to see Democrats in the streats with their constituents. I expect to see Democrats standing between protests and danger. A few do. Most are cowards, completely unaware of the moment.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 31/07/2026

Typical Schumer to propose the creation of a Bureau to stand up to the tyrants he is unwilling to stand up to himself.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 29/07/2026

its picked me losers or politicians that have won office only to fail to stand up when it matters. I've had it. I'm in my mid-forties and voting for the candidate most in line with my values (Hong). She might lose in the general. IDGAF.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 29/07/2026

Lordy, I read some comments on a political site I used to frequent much more often, and folks are hot mad that #Hong might win the WI Democratic primary. They talk about young voters supporting her, but I've gone with "electable" voting my whole life and

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 26/07/2026

Dewpoints well into the 80s in western Iowa due in part to near peak corn evaporation. Heat indices in spots over 120, and it has two or three hours to get worse.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 26/07/2026

Yeah, fire burning the peat is much worse than fire burning the recent production of herbs and shrubs, which in many instances still produces net gains in carbon over time from root turnover and charcoal inputs. ...and imagine if a forested system on the dried peat were burning.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 26/07/2026

of any ecosystem on earth, including tropical rainforest, would not exist. ...but that is only the case where those practices occur consistently over thousands of years such that ecosystems with immense complexity have time to develop. Fire intensity also has to be low and not damage the soil.

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Dan Carter @prairiebotanist.com · 26/07/2026

In many places its wildfires that wreck local biodiversity, and frequent indigenous cultural burning that promotes it. I'm not saying burning there (a place a know little about) is one of those cases, but in the absence of people the temperate grasslands with the highest small scale diversity...

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