CPD Event Detail

Description: 

Join the Native Plant Society of Saskatchewan for a tour of Grassland National Park's prairie restoration sites.  We will visit several different restored grassland areas, each varying in age (back to 2000), site characteristics, and approach.  A tour of Park's Canada's seed cleaning and storage facility is also included.  This tour is only open to Native Plant Society of Saskatchewan members, but memberships can be purchased prior to the tour on our website.  Here's a sneak peek into the tour:

Grasslands National Park acquired cultivated lands early in its establishment and used this as an opportunity to restore these areas back to native prairie communities. After some early seeding trials, the first large field was seeded in 2000 to a native species mix similar to adjacent upland communities. The last actively cultivated field was seeded in 2019 and recent monitoring has shown some very encouraging results, such as good native grass establishment and low cover of bare ground. Some surprises have emerged such as lichen and mosses, unassisted propagation of shrubs and forbs, and evidence that species at risk are using the fields. Restoration work still to come, consists of lands either seeded to crested wheatgrass or abandoned to revegetate naturally. Decades later, these sites which have been impacted by non-native plant species, do not provide the same habitat quality as unaltered native prairie. The lack of plant diversity is a concern from a habitat perspective but also does not leave much room for adaptation in our changing climate.