Prairie Plants: More Than Meets the Eye
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Preserving America's Wildlife Heritage

Prairie Plants: More Than Meets the Eye, also, Preserving America's Wildlife Heritage. . , Prairie Plants: More Than Meets the Eye , What appears at first glance to be an endless sea of grass is actually a wildly diverse community of plants. More than 100 different species of plants may be found in fewer than 5 acres of native prairie., Native prairies help keep our planet healthy. Intact prairie sod can absorb up to 9 inches of rain per hour, helping to prevent flooding. Also, the plants store carbon in the soil via their root system, helping to slow the pace of climate change., Visit in late spring or late summer to see the most wildflowers in bloom., Sidebar , Plants to Nourish, Plants to Heal , For thousands of years, Plains Indians relied on prairie plants for food, medicine, and other needs., The Dakota and Lakota people brewed tea from purple coneflower to relieve pain. People of the Cheyenne tribe use the tincture to treat snake bite and poison ivy rash., The Lakota roasted woolly verbena nutlets and ground them into a nutritious meal., The Dakota used an extract from silverleaf scurfpea to wash their horses' wounds., People of various Plains tribes extracted oil from sunflower seeds and used it in cooking and on their hair., Preserving America's Wildlife Heritage , On National Wildlife Refuges, Wildlife Comes First, National wildlife refuges protect a variety of habitats from arctic tundra to prairie grasslands to subtropical wetlands. These habitats support more than 700 bird species, 220 mammal species, 250 reptile and amphibian species, and more than 200 species of fish., Captions , In past years, the bald eagle nearly disappeared from the lower 48 states. Today, our proud national symbol is once again flourishing across america, thanks in part to the habitat protection provided by national wildlife refuges., The National Wildlife Refuge System, administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, protects and managers more than 150 million acres within more than 550 national wildlife refuges in all 50 states and U. S. territories. Each dot on the map represents a National Wildlife Refuge., Brown bears are protected at many Alaskan refugees, including the Arctic and Kodiak National Wildlife refugees., Elegant terns migrate along the Pacific coast from North to South America, nesting in dense colonies in San Diego National Wildlife Refuge., Arrowwood National Wildlife Refuge, located in the heart of the Prairie Pothole Region in North Dakota, is an important nesting area for the Northern pintail and other waterfowl., National Wildlife refuges offer many recreational opportunities for visitors, from wildlife observation and environmental education to hunting and fishing., Sandhill cranes migrate in huge numbers across the Great Plains. This spectacular phenomenon can be seen at Rainwater Basin Wetland Management District in Nebraska each spring and at Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico in the fall., Refuges protect and restore thousands of acres of wetlands that provide breeding, resting, and nesting habitat for millions of waterfowl, shorebirds, grassland birds, and other wildlife., National Elk Refuge in Jackson, Wyoming, is home to one of the world's largest wintering concentrations of elk.