It is! Thanks for tagging me :)
Now, we need to keep a few things in mind:
- There is no "original" state of an ecosystem. The word people are looking for is usually the pre-colonial and pre-industrial states of ecosystems. However, there is not a single unchanging pre-colonial state of an ecosystem either. This is why it's important to focus less on what the land "used to be" and more on what it is trying to restore itself to right now.
- There are a lot more subdivisions of ecosystem than "forest" vs. "grassland" vs. "wetland" and so on, and there can be tons of variation in small geographical areas.
- The classic closed canopy "forest" is not the only place trees are found. Many non-forest environments contain trees as a vital component.
As much as it is a mistake to presume that forests are universal, it is also a mistake to (for example) take the open, treeless tallgrass prairie to be the "original state" of all of the American Midwest.
There is a wide spectrum of intermediates between closed-canopy forest and grassland, and opener wooded land with grasses and small plants etc. on the ground is often called woodland (good explanation here)
In particular, a lot of the United States Midwest used to be (and still could be!) not prairie, not forest, but a secret third thing: oak savanna!
Maps disagree on the exact extent of the oak savanna. North-Central Kentucky, known as the Bluegrass now, was once a very rare open woodland type environment similar to the oak savanna.
Basically, oak savannas are grasslands full of large, open-grown oak trees, which are resistant to the periodic fires that maintain the prairie. Oaks, unlike many other trees, do very well growing to large sizes in the open.
But ecosystems get much more specialized, and it requires a holistic approach to pin down the exact nature of the place you live in. This is frustrating, but it also lets you discover the rare and unique characteristics of your area's ecosystems.
I'm going to go into just how wild this gets for a bit, so buckle up.
For example, I'll talk about the state I live in—why? because I live there and I know lots about it. Kentucky is divided into 27 ecoregions. In a single day, I could visit a dozen ecosystems unique to this area and to nowhere else in the world. The seeds to this uniqueness were planted hundreds of millions of years ago. Look at the linked map, and see how closely it matches this one:
The north-central-east area in pink is the Bluegrass, collared by the Knobs, a weird ring of Devonian and Silurian sandstone and conglomerates that forms little eroded plateaus and mountainous outcroppings. The lavender and dark blue is the limestone-karst plateau that holds the longest cave system on planet Earth. The east, in pale blue, is Lower and Middle Pennsylvanian (aka Carboniferous) deposits, making up the Appalachian Mountains.
The ancient Appalachians were once as tall as the Himalayas, but they are simply so old that they are eroded down into rounded, soft, wavy ridges that slowly fade into steep rolling hills, making it a subject of debate where they actually end.
Let's focus on the limestone and carbonate rock-dominant regions that cover much of the state though. This is what's known as a limestone karst region.
Limestone and dolomite are carbonate minerals. Instead of normal stuff like silicate minerals, they are made of the dissolved skeletons of billions of ancient aquatic animals, like brachiopods and bryozoans, which can be found fossilized throughout the state. Limestone is made of CaCO3, calcium carbonate—which, unlike other rocks, dissolves in acid.
This has two immediate consequences:
- the ground dissolves over time, which means the whole area is riddled with sinkholes and huge caves with subterranean rivers and lakes
- the soil is usually super alkaline, meaning plants that like acidic soil are basically nonexistent
As you can see, a unique ecosystem that existed over 450 million years ago can directly create unique ecosystems that exist now!
Kentucky's limestone karst regions, especially near the mountains, have another quirky characteristic: the limestone bedrock is exposed or nearly exposed in many places, with little soil on top of it. I don't know exactly why this is, but instead of several feet of soil on top of the bedrock, we often get just a few inches. Almost any construction that involves earth-moving requires dynamite. Hillsides used as pasture for cattle erode into slopes of broken rock.
This creates another form of unique ecosystem: limestone glades. Places with only a few inches of topsoil don't develop into closed-canopy forests, but rather limestone glade meadows, where the dominant trees are these guys:
the majestic Eastern Red Cedar (which is actually a juniper), a pioneer species that, unusually for pioneer species, can live a long time...over 900 years.
Red Cedars might outlive every single other tree in a forest, but they don't thrive in there. They hate the shade and want to be alone in a meadow. Why, then, do they live so long? I have a hunch the answer might be that they're not exactly pioneer species at all, but rather specialized for mountain ridges, rocky outcrops, and limestone glades where other trees cannot grow. They provide food and great nesting sites for birds.
Kentucky, (at least according to the book i'm reading by Donald Edward Davis titled Where There are Mountains), was once Kaintuck, or CANE-tuck. Giant cane, like the oaks of oak savannas, is fire resistant, meaning it thrives in areas managed by frequent fires.
In my state, the canebrakes used to stretch for miles, dense bamboo forests that could grow up to 25 feet tall. But they were all destroyed, meaning this ecosystem is practically extinct. The giant cane still lives, but only in small patches.
Canebrakes are considered extinct (although they could be restored), and oak savannas are one of the most endangered ecosystems on the continent. I suspect that the reason is that people are stuck with the old, simplified categories of ecosystem that they learned in school, and ecosystems that don't fit into those categories are hard to imagine.
Everything in biology is much, much more complex than high school teaches you, and ecosystems are no exception. There is probably a super rare, unique ecosystem close to you that doesn't get enough recognition.
To protect them, people have to care, and to care, people have to know they exist...so everything starts with being curious. Learn! Tell others! It will save the world.
