What sets the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve aside from other prairies?
Fuhlendorf: The Tallgrass Prairie Preserve sits at the southern end of the last piece of tallgrass prairie left in the world. The estimates are that there’s no longer more than one percent of the original tallgrass prairie that occurred here historically at the time of European settlement, which started in the 1850s. The reason this area is still intact is because it has lots of rock that kept it from being cultivated by settlers. It’s also some of the most productive prairie left in the world. Q: How do you think a biologist might look at this prairie differently than a historian? Fuhlendorf: The basic difference between a biologist’s perspective and a historian’s perspective is that some biologists try to remove humans from their studies. But this landscape is a very, very nice place to see that they’re really linked. You can’t understand all of biology without understanding some about history, so it’s fairly typical for biologists to at least be partially interested in the history o
