Prairie diversity calls to mind bluestem grasses, a variety of forbs and flowers and grassland birds, but native prairies are also habitat for many species of butterflies. Over 140 species of butterflies are native to Mississippi, and dozens of them depend on grassland for habitat.

Sam Riffell, a new faculty member in the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries at Mississippi State University, is working with private landowners to monitor prairie restoration throughout Mississippi’s Blackland Prairie from a butterfly perspective. He is monitoring restoration areas that were planted to native grasses this past spring. Riffell and the landowners are monitoring not only a large tract of native prairie restoration, but also restored prairie field buffers that are part of the Conservation Reserve Program’s CP33 wildlife habitat buffers program to create Northern bobwhite habitat.

“Our overall objective is to increase the probability that grassland restorations succeed,” Riffell said. “One of the monitoring techniques is the development of a butterfly-based indicator of restoration success.”

Butterflies may be useful indicators because caterpillars (butterfly larvae) are herbivores and feed on prairie plants. Many caterpillars feed only on specific prairie plants; so many species will not be present unless the restored prairie plant community is sufficiently developed. Also, butterflies are easy to identify in the field, are widely distributed geographically and often respond to human activities in the same fashion as other organisms like birds. Thus, quick butterfly surveys in restored prairie may be able to tell us much about the quality of the restored plant community and its suitability as wildlife habitat.

The value of this research goes far beyond just developing indicators. Riffell hopes that this project will help improve our knowledge about how to best restore native prairie in Mississippi. For example, he is using butterfly data to evaluate the effectiveness of different pre-planting herbicide rates. Also, comparing butterfly communities in the large tract to thin, narrow (60 – 120 feet) field borders will help evaluate how well field borders and other conservation practices contribute to the conservation of biodiversity in actively-cropped landscapes.

Next year, Riffell hopes to expand the project to evaluate the effects of grazing on native prairie diversity. “Knowledge about how to accommodate both biodiversity (butterfly communities) and agricultural production (row crop and grazing) on grassland tracts is important to conserving natural resources on privately-owned land,” Riffell said.