A VIRTUAL PLANT WALK THROUGH COMMONS FORD PRAIRIE

A virtual plant walk through Commons Ford Prairie

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/play/65EtIr2vrW83HdPHtwSDVvB_W9W_Jv6s03VK86Fbnxu3UCJVMQf3Y7JEauoiwD7PFxG82o0tZU9a0O7S?startTime=1589497386000

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!