Amy Concilio
Environmental Science & Policy
St. Edward's University
Save Barton Springs Association Happy Hour Series
May 14, 2020
The Commons Ford prairie restoration was recently featured in the Save Barton Creek Association’s
Happy Hour speaker series. The speaker
was Dr. Amy Concilio, a plant ecologist and professor of Environmental Science
and Policy at St. Edward's University. Amy has been leading the vegetation
sampling campaigns to monitor restoration success at Commons Ford prairie since
2017 with a team of enthusiastic students and volunteers. Because of the COVID-19
pandemic, the Happy Hour was held over zoom and recorded. Amy took the group on
a virtual tour of the restored prairie. She introduced some of the dominant and
exciting rare grasses and wildflowers that have returned to the site, and
discussed the implications of the restoration for ecosystem functioning
and biodiversity conservation. She provided the audience with tips for how to
identify commons grasses and wildflowers at the site and showed lots of pretty
pictures- some of which came from the CFPRO Flickr page. You can watch the
presentation by clicking on this link: https://stedwards.zoom.us/rec/
Additionally, Amy posted the plant profile slides from the presentation on the outreach
page of her website, available here. You could use this to identify plants at the site!
