“The most surprising thing to me was how quickly we saw the changes,” said Kemmerling, who is now a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Minnesota. “We were excited to see that the benefits of prairie strips for biodiversity and ecosystems in the strips spilled over into cropland.” “Prairie strips have broad-ranging effects - including improved soil health and increased biodiversity,” said Haddad, who is also the director of the Long-Term Ecological Research, or LTER, site at KBS.

That is, prairie strips could be implemented without compromising crop yield. When combined with the right field management practices, the array of benefits gained by adding a prairie strip essentially offset the loss of cropland. For example, the prairie strips attracted more pollinators and increased pollinator activity near the strips. The team showed that a prairie strip’s flora and fauna brought an array of beneficial “ecosystem services” to the strips and the surrounding farmland. These regions grew into what are known as prairie strips, slivers of land that increase biodiversity by attracting native pollinators and other organisms that are less prevalent on developed land. Kellogg Biological Station, or KBS, they selected narrow regions in research fields where, instead of crops, they planted prairie vegetation native to southwest Michigan.

Haddad, Kemmerling and their colleagues studied a variety of current farmland management practices with a twist. Kellogg Biological Station in the College of Natural Science’s Department of Integrative Biology and in the Ecology, Evolution and Behavior program. Kemmerling earned her doctorate while working on the project in the lab of Nick Haddad, a professor at MSU’s W.K.

“We need to make this land habitable for species and for the ecosystem services the increased biodiversity can provide to the farms.” “The goal is to do both simultaneously in the vast area planted in row crops,” said Lindsey Kemmerling, the first author of the MSU-led study published May 10 in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. Lindsey Kemmerling, who earned her doctorate from MSU in 2022.

Promised Land by Rose Lerner