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Re: How local is local?

I'm admittedly not an eco-purist.  IMHO, people trying to revegetate
cultivated/disturbed areas to a "natural" state can worry far too much about
having the exact genotypes that may have inhabited an area before man
arrived on the scene.  It is a commendable effort to re-establish prairies
at all.  It isn't necessary that they be exactly the same as may have
occupied a particular site hundreds of years ago.  We forget that there is
in any given species immense variability (or maybe we are too aware of it,
and and are thus focusing only on the intra-specific differences between
individuals).  Yes there may be variability between the typical (most
common?) form of a plant found in one county as opposed to another.  But are
the differences necessary to survival in one county as opposed to another?
No.  Are the differences sufficiently great as to support different species
of animals that feed or depend upon the species?  No.   If there is
difference between populations of a species from different counties, what is
lost (or rather not regained) by planting a form other than the one that
used to  predominate in a particular site?  The absence of the presence of
that form, only.  The genes that allowed the missing form to predominate in
a particular are may well still be in the general of the species from other
areas.  If the missing form offered the plant a competitive advantage over
other forms of the species, one can expect it to appear again.  If it
didn't, it's a matter of chance whether a form will arise again.  If the
form of the species that used to grow in an area  is so highly evolved from
the the rest of the species that only it can survive in that particular
area, then the form you plant, if different, won't survive, and you don't
have a problem.  This is not very likely.  It seems that most of the effort
to replant with only forms of plants that used to grow in any particular are
is an effort to recreate,  museum-like, a scene that may have existed.  But
even that scene was always a living, changing scene, as change occurred in
the environment.  It was hardly constant over time.  One should not forget
that a lot of what was prairie in the midwest two hundred years ago, was
under a hundred feet of ice in the recent past.  What plants grew in various
areas, as ice advanced and receded (even in aras not ice-covered) has
undoubtedly changed many times.

Frank Hassler wrote:

> tallgrass mix from Fermi Lab, fortified with extra forbs from the
> surrounding Kane County.  But that's just the trouble.  The Red Bison
> Prairie Corridor is
> about 120 miles as the crow flies, south of Fermilab.  What should they
> do?  They've been trying to work out a trade with a
> site half way between the two, such as Goose Lake Prairie or Midewin
> National Tallgrass Prairie, and have been talking the the IDNR, though I
> don't think they're getting to far with that. Many of the people around
> here are eco-type purists, and I feel I am of
> that camp as well.  But when we're talking about problems of recreating
> whole ecosystems from scraps, can we be so picky?  As mentioned before,
> didn't they move around with Native American's and such in the past?  Is
> the slight climatic difference between Champaign and Batavia (Fermilab)
> enough to warrant such concern?

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