this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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I read an interesting hypothesis a few months ago that the vast herds of bison were actually due to indigenous Americans being killed off by disease due to European settlers. They were no longer managing the land, so the grasses took over and the bison population exploded.
Obviously, there were still far more bison than there are today, but possibly not the massive herds of thousands that colonists reported seeing on their way west.
That's an incorrect hypothesis. Tall grass prairie, while definitely manipulated by indigenous people, doesn't really require management; it's the climax community for the biome. Further, fringe areas, like parkland, actually encroach on grasslands, not the other way around.
Grasses are disturbance specialists, and prairie has a natural and short fire cycle that maintains this disturbance. Take away the disturbance and you get woody species coming in on the fringe areas. In this regard, First Nations would burn parkland to create more area for grassland. If their population were declining, the lack of management would result in less bison habitat, not more.
E: I'm hilariously lost with the original comment - everyone point and laugh please. Lmao.
Praires absolutely do require management. Floods and fires can and do lead to critical endangerment of plants and animals.
Overgrazing wildlife also need to be controlled with predators who in turn often need to be contained to prevemt damage to human settlements or overpopulation leading to periods of death and disease for the animals.
In theory if you have well suited animals to fill each role, wide open replacement habitats for migrating to in emergency, and no invasive pest problems; it could be self sufficient, but thats pretty much never going to be the case.
I disagree.
Floods and fire can impact ecosystem composition at a local or regional scale, but these components are entirely necessary for ecosystem renewal and diversity. As parts of an ecosystem are disturbed, it opens niche space for early seral plants. Fire cycles can vary substantially even grasslands.
The reason these systems need human management now is because they have been highly disturbed, and the whole system is out of whack. Roughly 2-5% of the tall grass prairie remains. The overgrazing and invasive pests/plants issue you touch on is anthropogenic in origin, not so much in undisturbed systems.