Jordan Coscia is a PhD student in the Restoration Ecology Lab at Virginia Tech and a graduate fellow at Virginia Working Landscapes, a program of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. She describes her research goals and includes a preliminary species list for natural and semi-natural grasslands on the northern Virginia Piedmont.
You may have heard the legend that before European colonization, a squirrel could get from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi by hopping from tree to tree. While the pre-European landscape of the eastern United States was indeed quite different from what we see today, the idea of a vast, all-encompassing forest is misleading. Particularly in the Southeast, open, grassy habitats such as meadows, pine and oak savannas, glades, and barrens were interspersed with hardwood forests. This mosaic of forests and open savannas was maintained by grazing elk and bison, variation in soil types and depth, and regular fires set by both lightning strikes and Indigenous peoples. All of these grassland-maintaining processes were disrupted by the introduction of European development and agricultural practices.
As a PhD student in the Restoration Ecology Lab at Virginia Tech and a graduate research fellow with the Smithsonian’s Virginia Working Landscapes program, I am researching native warm-season grasslands in Virginia. I have three main goals:
(1) To describe the plant species that characterize native warm-season grassland communities on the Virginia Piedmont;
(2) To determine which ecological processes and environmental conditions allow these grasslands to thrive and persist in tandem with forests; and
(3) To determine the best methods to restore and reconstruct these communities where they have been lost.
I am accomplishing the first of these goals, the description of Virginia’s Piedmont grassland communities, by surveying the plant species found in existing Virginia grasslands. Today, most high-quality grassland sites in Virginia are in areas where routine maintenance prevents the growth of shrubs and trees and keeps the habitat open for the sun-loving grassland plants. Many highly diverse sites, for example, are found in powerline rights-of-ways that are maintained by annual mowing.
By surveying native grassland fragments such as those found in rights-of-ways, we can determine the plant species that are characteristic of these habitats. We can then include these species in planted grasslands and native grassland seed mixes to create more ecologically accurate restorations. In the summer of 2020, the Restoration Ecology Lab at Virginia Tech partnered with the Clifton Institute and Virginia Working Landscapes to identify and survey remnant and semi-natural grassland plant communities across northern Virginia. The results of these surveys will inform future grassland restoration projects in the area, including my own grassland restoration experiment that will test the effectiveness of different grassland installation and management techniques. While a full report of the survey results will be available in a future publication, you can find a sneak peak of the full list of the species recorded in our 2020 surveys below.
Across 34 sites, we identified 354 taxa (including subspecies and varieties), with an additional 53 groups only identifiable to genus or family. Of those identified to genus level or better, 330 (81%) are considered native, 41 (10%) are introduced, 11 (3%) are invasive, and 25 (6%) are of uncertain status in northern Virginia. The three most commonly recorded species were little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), narrowleaf mountainmint (Pycnanthemum tenuifolium), and tapered rosette grass (Dichanthelium acuminatum).
Our species list is available for download below.
The final column is a count of occurrence, or how many sites a plant was recorded in, with a maximum possible value of 34. Plants are listed alphabetically by Latin species name in descending order of occurrence.
We are continuing this work in 2021 through a collaborative effort with the Center for Urban Habitats. This year, we have expanded our grassland discovery and characterization to an eight-county area centered on the city of Charlottesville in the central Piedmont. With a larger team and a refined protocol, we have already discovered more than 300 remnant grassland fragments this growing season. Both the 2020 and 2021 surveys are generously supported by research grants from the Virginia Native Plant Society.
Note: Part of this work represents a USDA NIFA Hatch project.
Natural History of Ecological Restoration 
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