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Minnesota Plant Press The Minnesota Native Plant Society Newsletter Volume 25 Number 4 Summer 2006 Monthly meetings Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center, 3815 American Blvd. East Bloomington, MN 55425 -1600 952 -854 -5900 6:00 p.m. — Building east door opens 6:00 p.m. — Refreshments, information, Room A 7 — 9 p.m — Program, society business 9:00 p.m. — Building closes Programs The MN NPS meets the first Thursday in October, November, December, February, March, April, May, and June. Check the website for more program information. Oct. 5: "Semi- Natural Grasslands for Biofuel and Ecological Services ?" by Dr. Nicholas Jordan, professor, Department of Agroecology, Agronomy and Plant Genetics, University of Minnesota. Plant of the Month: to be determined. Nov. 2: "The Importance of Native Plants in the Streamside Environment," by Brian Nerbonne, stream habitat specialist, MN DNR Central Region Fisheries. Annual seed exchange. Dec. 7: "Growth Pressures on Sensitive Natural Areas in DNR's Central Region," by Sharon Pfeifer, regional planner, DNR Central Region. Feb. 1: "Recent Highlights in the Minnesota County Biological Survey," by Carmen Converse, county biolgical survey supervisor, DNR. MN NPS website www.rnnnps.org e -mail: contact @mnnps.org MN NPS Listserve Send a message that includes the word "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" and your name in the body of the message to: rnn- natpl- request @stolaf. edu Natural prairies hold key to sustainable fuels By Deane Morrison. Reprinted with permission, from UMNnews, University of Minnesota. As gas prices inch higher, the search is on for renewable, plant - based fuels that don't require fertilizer or pesticides, which both require energy to produce. A solution may be at hand, from University ecologist David Tilman and two colleagues: Instead of growing a single fuel - source crop, grow many species together, because such plantations yield more total vegetation — and do it more reliably — than any growing just one species. The most cited ecologist in the world, Tilman has long been singing the praises of biodiversity, as the coexistence of many species is called. In May, he and two colleagues (University forest resources professor Peter Reich and Johannes Knops of the University of Nebraska) published a paper in the journal Nature in which they sum up 12 years of experiments at the University's Cedar Creek Natural History Area. The longest - running experiment of its kind, it shows unequivocally that plots of land with numerous species produce much more "biomass" and suffer less from fluctuations in productivity than plots with only one or a few species. This makes diverse plantings the likeliest candidates to drive the "bio" revolution. Think species diversity The paper is a call to everyone who wants to extract energy from biomass to start thinking in teens of species diversity. Biomass can be either burned for energy or refined to produce concentrated energy in the form of biofuels, such as ethanol, or synfuel gasoline and diesel. The greater the yield of biomass per acre, the better, and data from. Cedar Creek show that diverse plantings fill the bill. "Diverse prairie grasslands are 240 percent more productive than grasslands with a single prairie species," says Tilman, a Regents Professor of Ecology in the Continued on page 4 In this issue Presidents' columns 2, 3 Field trip 3 Art Hawkins 3 Hastings prairie 4 SE Minnesota sites 5 Mad dog skullcap 6 Arden Hills restoration 6 Membership form 7