Black Jack Battlefield & Nature Park Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi Inoculation Study, Wellsville, KS, 2021-2022

Black Jack Battlefield & Nature Park (Wellsville, Kansas, USA) has a rich history of Indigenous stewardship, civil war conflict, agriculture, and, most recently, a decades-old ecological restoration of the tallgrass prairie ecosystem. To potentially aid this recovery, we tested the impact of inoculation with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi cultured from regional remnant prairies on the survival and growth of 12 native prairie plant species. We grew these plants for a few weeks in the greenhouse with either sterile or AM fungi-inoculated soil. We then planted these into 24 experimental blocks with a 1x1 m field plot for each treatment (48 plots total) containing all 12 plant species when possible. We then tracked the survival and growth of the plants two weeks, about five months, and about fifteen months after planting. Growth was measured as height at all timepoints, and leaf number was included for most species in the latest timepoint. We found impacts of inoculation and species identity on both the survival and growth of the plants.