No ecosystem can ever be restored to the way it was. That is the widely held opinion of restoration ecologists. Once the fragile relationships between plant and animal species and the soil they live on are severed, it may not be possible to restore and optimize them all in our lifetime. That is because these relationships exist in networks of interactions that, over time, have been finely honed as to the numbers and locations of each component organism. The same goes for prairie restoration. In fact, some prefer to conservatively call prairie restoration revegetation instead, revealing their guarded optimism that if you plant it, the fauna will come. But restoration is so much more widely used across ecosystems that I’ll stick with it.

Most of us don’t have the expertise to restore a large prairie on our own. However, we all have enough know-how to do some basic restoration on land we manage, even our own backyards.  Restoration stories can help, especially if they are about people like you who just want to make their land do more good than harm. While many, like me, do have a biology background, none are prairie experts. They, like us, are learning as they go. They didn’t know all the plant species before they started either. But their prairie restorations have enriched their lives as well as the lives of the flora and fauna that have settled there. Their stories can help you do the same.