Progress on the Palouse
Eastern’s multi-year Prairie Restoration Project reaches a milestone.
As previously noted in this magazine, Eastern’s Prairie Restoration Project aims to return a 120-acre parcel of university-owned farmland to its native habitat, thus creating a “living laboratory” of restored Northern Palouse prairie proximate to the Cheney campus. Together with the Spokane and other local tribes — Native peoples who for millennia called these bounteous hills home — the project’s ultimate goal is to help the entire university community better understand and appreciate this unique ecosystem.
This spring the project is closing in on a major milestone: clearing the ground for native grasses by purging the soil of noxious weeds. “It has been really exciting to see the restoration develop to this point,” says Erik Budsberg, project leader and director of sustainability at EWU. Both graduate students and undergraduates have studied with the project, he says, “all to help us gain a better understanding of how to proceed to this next phase.”
“It has been really exciting to see the restoration develop to this point,” says Erik Budsberg, project leader and director of sustainability at EWU.
This “next phase” will bring more visible progress. When the ground is clear, the entire acreage will be “drill seeded” with a mix of wild grasses that student researchers have determined are resilient enough to form root systems. These systems will become the living foundation of the restored prairie.
While the weeding and seeding won’t be completed until fall, project findings are already having a broader impact. “What we’ve learned has informed our decision to develop a climate-resiliency landscaping master plan,” Budsberg says. “We will be converting all of campus landscaping over to the native drought-tolerate plants that are more representative of the regional biodiversity.”
Back on the prairie, meanwhile, the “living-laboratory” part of the mission is also making progress. Both on the site and in Eastern’s research greenhouses, project participants say restoration-related activities have become an important source of interdisciplinary collaborations and investigations. “The research we’ve been doing has been helping us understand the Prairie Restoration Project as a complete ecosystem resource,” says Budsberg.
