Ohio Prairies

Although Ohio typically is not thought of as a "prairie state," portions of Ohio did include extensive areas where trees were sparse. The word"prairie" is from the French "pré" which translates into English as "meadow"--a meadow and a prairie are similar in the sense that they both lack woody vegetation. The key difference between the two is that a prairie is a stable, self-perpetuation community instead of being a sparse woodland area. The plants that dominate prairies tend to be specialist in that habitat that have genetically evolved to allow themselves to be tolerable of drought, fire and low levels of nitrogen in the soil. The most striking plants of the prairie are the tall grasses that thrive in the warm summer weather such as big bluestem, Indian grass, switchgrass, little bluestem and prairie cordgrass. There are also lots of colors in the prairies given by colorful forbs (non-woody wildflower plants that are neither grasses nor grass-like); many of these forbs are members of the aster family and the legume family.

Grasslands occur worldwide, mainly in the dry interiors of continents. In North America, prairies are differentiated into the drier western shortgrass prairie that blends into desert and the moister midwestern tallgrass prairie that borders forest. In order to understand the reason why we have prairie areas in Ohio, hundreds of miles east of the Great Plains region, it is necessary to go back 8,000 years in history, shortly after the retreat of the last great ice sheet to cover Ohio, the Wisconsin Glacier. From 8,000 years ago until 4,000 years ago, the xerothermic period took place in which the North American climate was considerably warmer and drier than it is presently. During this interval, a tongue of prairie became established across Illinois, Indiana and Ohio but barely extends into Pennsylvania and parts of southern Ontario. Due to the shape of the area, it became known as the "Prairie Peninsula."

The prairies that remained in the peninsula after the climate changed to that of present-day conditions tended to occur as scattered islands in an otherwise forested country. In Ohio, an estimated 2% of the state was prairie during pre-settlement times. They were clustered in discrete regions where a combination of soil conditions, topography and continual fire-setting by Native Americans kept forest from taking over. Today, much of the prairie management is focused on discouraging woodland plants.