I’ve converted the bulk of the lawn on my lot back to prairie/woodland opening, and I feel like everyone is much more chill. I now have wasps, yellowjackets, and of course bees amicably buzzing around, in addition to the WASPs telling me how much they like it.
I really recommend reading ‘The Tallgrass Prairie Restoration Handbook’. It’s all super readable, interesting, actionable ideas and theory for growing prairie from degraded fields.
I love that! I actually haven’t read that one- but SER press is always good. Thanks! I’ve been trying to experiment with small scale prairie restoration at my home- I have one garden going on 2 years old, and one going on one. Going to try interplanting with edibles and see how they compare with my raised bed stuff. I’ve been giving out seed and instructions with how to establish it in a box on the sidewalk. I wish there was a way to non-intrusively have people submit location/condition info, because I feel like it’d be cool to map/develop an urban/suburban ecological corridor
I would be super interested in this too! There has to be a citizen science project about this. Probably, you could look at native plant citizen science datasets and roughly extrapolate soil conditions from the presence of preferential plants. Although so much prairie/native restoration around me is just a few very hardy grasses at this point with a few ruderals like asters and goldenrods that will grow literally anywhere in my region lol.