Wednesday, November 7, 2007 - 11:15 AM
237-7

Using Switchgrasses to Meet Natural Resources and Native American Cultural Objectives.

Antonio Palazzo1, Andrew Hamblin2, and Timothy Cary1. (1) US Army, USA CRREL, 72 Lyme Rd., Hanover, NH 03755-1290, (2) ERDC-CERL, 2902 Newmark Drive, champaign, IL 61826

The native plant, switchgrass (Panicum vergatum L.), has been found to be resilient to training and competitive with invasive weed establishment a cool, humid climate at Fort Drum in Watertown, NY.  However, switchgrass takes about four years to properly establish in cool, humid climates.  To help establish this species, we developed the ecological bridge seeding technique to better establish this species.  This technique utilizes a mixture of native and a faster establishing introduced species to eventually obtain a native grass sward.  The objective of this work is to transition these results of establishing switchgrasses into another climatic area.  The Engineering Research and Development Center and Haskell Indian Nations University (HINU) are working cooperatively to better establish switchgrasses in warm, humid climate.  Currently, HINU is studying seed collection techniques to collect locally adaptable populations of this species and have established a evaluation site at the university with about 40 populations of this collected at Fort Polk.  We will also be establishing ecological bridge type seedings at Fort Riley to determine which seed mixtures will best be able to establish switchgrasses.

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