Basically the buffalo herds and the Indians (setting fires to grasslands) limited the natural expansion of Eastern Red Cedar into the plains area.
Down here at the southern part of the Blackland Prairie, ERC has moved about 75-100 miles further west and has crossed I-35. Ashe Juniper has moved east about 100 miles and in some places the two junipers are in a fight for supremacy!
The settlers from the east have aided ERC in three ways : plowed the grasslands under, overgazed those left, and planted ERC around their houses.

"Also, how many different subspecies of Juniperus virginiana are there? "

Two:
Juniperus virginiana subsp. virginiana (Eastern Juniper) - most of the species' range, except as below.
Juniperus virginiana subsp. silicicola (Southern Juniper) - Gulf coast, Florida, Atlantic coast north to NC.

Resin

hmmmmm ... i have been suggesting to neophytes not to plant these things because ... in my world.. using the term non-scientifically .. they are invasive..

but no .. they all argue with me...

rotflmbo ...

if birds spread them .. and they cover thousands of miles of highway shoulder in MI [and i kill dozens of them in my yard every year] .. in my world ... limited as it may be ... they are invasive ... native or not ...

like you didnt see that coming ... lol ...

ken

You can't invade your own home, you can only invade places where you don't belong. So therefore, they are, by definition, not invasive. Aggressive, yes, weedy, maybe, but not invasive!

Resin

An interesting dilemma. As mentioned, it was fires and bison herds which kept the ERC at bay across the Plains, so that without both, it is invading. One important question which I don't have the answer for is how much of the fires were started by Native Americans... if it was a majority, then this may be partly a reversion to what is really "natural". Its a debate which has also been had in the Pine Barrens of the Northeastern US... if it wasn't for fires started by Native Americans, how much of those Pine Barrens would be present?

Viginiana is actually a very lovely tree in it's maturity. Too bad it takes so long for it to reach there, or we would use them regularly in our landscaping.

As it is, they are indeed taking over any bit of un-attended property. In the Flint Hills, controlled burns are still performed each year. In the eastern part of the state, the best control was found to be bulldozing the overgrown pasture and building a strip mall or a couple hundred ticky-tacky tract homes.

With the downturn in the economy, I predict a continuing spread of red cedars....

brian

"One important question which I don't have the answer for is how much of the fires were started by Native Americans... if it was a majority, then this may be partly a reversion to what is really "natural". Its a debate which has also been had in the Pine Barrens of the Northeastern US... if it wasn't for fires started by Native Americans, how much of those Pine Barrens would be present?"

Good comment. One wonders what the place of Eastern Juniper was in the mammoth steppe ecosystems that existed before Homo "sapiens" came on the scene.

"In the eastern part of the state, the best control was found to be bulldozing the overgrown pasture and building a strip mall or a couple hundred ticky-tacky tract homes"

Ouch!! But too true :-((

Resin

Amongst prairie enthusiasts, there is a very wide latitude given to the idea of plants being invasive. I could go on and on about this as it is something I've been watching play out for years now. In fact, I am now a part of this as it has been given to me to manage the "native" vegetation around this community's storm water detention ponds, consisting of.....what else....prairie plantings. This despite the fact that prairies made up only a tiny percentage of this region's initial vegetation coverage at the time of European settlement.

Basically what happened here is that engineers, not plant people, designed these ponds, and were somehow convinced that to follow the regulations that an attempt be made to have "native vegetation" around these structures, prairie plant communities needed to be established.

This despite the fact that all around these engineers were numerous examples of the forest, shrub wetlands, and marshes that were the real native vegetation communities.

So now we burn, we spray "invasive" native shrubs like red twigged dogwood, and we scrupulously prevent the entirely natural progression of such sites into forest, that would surely occur otherwise.

Kinda sucks to have to implement these initiatives. I am working to broaden the palette of what can be used around these ponds, but I'm getting there 15 years too late to effectively steer the outcome.

+oM

Being a NJ native, I need to take a moment to credit NJDOT. I know a lot of states have grassy interchanges with a tree here or there... even states where the natural course of action would be a lot of forest growing up in their place. Not in New Jersey, though. Along highways maintained by the NJDOT, aside from the necessary clear area for the soft shoulder, land around highways is generally allowed to return to its natural state, such that there are now thickets of young trees between highway ramps or even in the highway median where it is particularly wide. Maybe its just the cost savings aspect of not trying to maintain so much land in a non-natural state, but kudos for them to allow nature to take its course.

This invasive noninvasive division is getting out of hand. Here in The Netherlands they also like rampaged countrysides like heather and inland sanddunes. IN NW Europe, forest is what you get without human interference. From 1100 forests were cut so massively, that they gave way to heath and sanddunes. Cattle kept them this way and we lost vast vast tracks of woodland. So now, with cattle out of the way, woods return. First to shwow up are Betula pendual and Pinus sylvestris. Later on you get oak, beech and spruce (depending on where you live in NW Europe).

Now if you are an exotic species and you enter this manmade habitat, you are an invasive exotic pest. You are not too fortunate either when you are a birch or scots pine: now you are called a pioneer species (how nobel) but get killed anyway. How is it that species hat grow somewhere because of human assistance are "bad" and unwelcome while whole habitats that are manmade are ""good" and highly valued? Because this has nothing to do with sceicne, but everything with sentiment. And this sentiment is the same as we see in culture: newcomers (or those perceived as such) are unwelcome and if they are numerous they are approached very negatively. We simply look at what is "bad" and foget that some natives act exaclty the same.

How something can be "aggresive" by simply growing somewhere sois beyond me btw. Prolific is the right term. I think grass is prolific too. Or Prunus serotina over here. Or Doug fir over here (NL). Or Quercus rubra...but we see A LOT more Quercus robur. Acer pseudoplatanus is also extremly prolific.

Management ofthings liek heather and I guess prairie too is very expensive. And I just read if you don't do anything over here in the NL within 10 years you have a birch/pine forest (well, a good start of one).

I wonder why everybody is upset with cutting down the Amazoneand other tropical forest zone... Aren't these people allowed to create their own manmade habitats?

Juniperus virginiana is kind of weird in that it establishes and reproduces in grassland areas very well but it is very flammable and has no fire resistance at all. Where I live it used to be restricted to cliffs and rock outcroppings. More recently it has been widely planted in windbreaks and wildlife food and shelter plots. Without fire J.v. is able to turn grassland into dense, dark, and dry forest with no understory except for a few weeds and shrubs. Some of these new J.v. dominated forests (especially along the upper MN River valley) look like a massive forest fire waiting to happen.
I think even natural prairie fire regimes without human help would have been enough to keep J.v. from spreading outside of its fire protected habitat.

"I think even natural prairie fire regimes without human help would have been enough to keep J.v. from spreading outside of its fire protected habitat"

I have my doubts - I suspect in an environment where megafauna grazed most of the plant biomass, natural fire would be very rare. But equally, junipers may have been restricted to the same cliffs and rock outcroppings, not because of fire, but because of their inaccessibility to large herbivores.

Resin

Plant ecologists use the term "invasion" both for plants establishing in weedy fashion in ground new to them; and also to plants establishing on an area as part of their normal successional cycle (also called ecesis or something equally ugly). Range ecologists have no tolerance for trees, so they get paranoid when trees start growing in their pastures, even if they have opened the ground to those trees by grazing the hell out of the land. So blame the trees, rip them out by further abusing the land, and re-abuse it with cattle.
In pinyon & juniper country out west, range guys are given supervision over this coniferous semi-arid land forest. Where it regenerates successfully they fail to distinguish between restocking of a historically deforested area, or establishing in areas where it has been absent. So they solve the problem by destroying the trees when they can. Public lands in Nevada will probably soon have their pinyon-juniper forests chipped into biomass fuel and the cleared land put into low-grade pasture; all justified by the narrative of invasion, brought to a heated passion of being taken over.

The real scoop.

Hit the link.

Here is a link that might be useful: Juniperus virginiana in Kansas

Nevada is another place where fire suppression has significantly altered the landscape, but not by the addition of trees. There has been some increase in acreage of Pinyon/Juniper woodland, but the real increase has been sagebrush. Apparently, before the white man and his cattle and fire suppression arrived, Nevada was 2/3rds grassland. Now its more sagebrush than anything else. With the cattle eating the grass, and fire suppressed, sagebrush has taken over Nevada. Sagebrush, like Juniper, has absolutely no fire resistance whatsoever. You'd think that maybe a non-coniferous shrub with deep roots would be able to survive fire... but nope.

http://www.k-state.edu/nres/capstone/RedcedarReportS10.pdf

I can't be sure, but that report looks like it was written by a bunch of undergrads.

Kansas State is one of the premier agriculture schools in the United States.

"I can't be sure, but that report looks like it was written by a bunch of undergrads". Well...yea.. one way of obtaining your credits for your degree. Probably a requirement.

What are you getting at?

Are you saying this study could be compromised and hold some untruths because undergrads participated in it.

I don't think this study would be allowed to surface on the inter net without the approval of Dr. Kevin Price who heads up the Geography Department.

If you dispute these findings I would be interested in seeing what you have to say and where their findings are in doubt.

Dave

This highly unscientific. It is typical in ecology which many times is more ideology than science. In the first part, we reed this:

"Our results show that Eastern redcedar is increasing in density in Kansas prairies from
research that we have studied. Invasion of redcedar has been estimated to be 56.9 trees per
hectare per year (reference??). When redcedar become more abundant than grass and begin to
take over, they decrease the amount of plant species growing under them and lower biodiversity
according to our sources and data. There are more plant species found in native prairie than in
redcedar forest. In order to control this problem, proper management techniques need to be
taken to prevent further invasion. Our literature review shows that with proper control, Eastern
redcedar can be kept under control and not pose a problem."

What is a problem or not, is a personal point of view. If I like redcedar more than grass, it is not a problem, it is very good. Scientists can never tell us whether something should be perceived as a problem or not. They can only tell us, in an unbiased way, what happens and whether the change is significant or not. It is ideology that tells us what we should think and do about something.
Not science. This again is something a society has to decide. For instance: do the people like it or not? Do they want to spend money on it, if they don't like it? Is there money for it? Does eradication help, is it feasable? Is eradication of plants something we think is "good" as a society? Etc? No scientist can tell us that.
What are the longterm costs of constant eradication? What if we stop for ten years (because of economy for instance): will all efforts be in vain??

What are the long term effects of this invasion on biodiversity? I can understand some PLANTS of course wil not survive in a forest, but what plants will return and on what time scale? How will the biodiversity look like int 10-50 and 100 years?
In virtually all cases I know, forests (native and nonantive) carry much more biodiverisity than any grassland.
Is biodiversity a good marker for what is good or bad? For what is desirable and what is not in the landscape?
Why? Why is it not esthectics, or why shouldn't we look at funghi tat grow under these trees, or animal life or a combination of those?

It is like climatologists writing papers on seaice decline and than telling us what we should do. That we should boycot the US as the highest emitter of CO2 per capita. Or that we should sanction China for it. In their free time on ther personal accoutn, they ar efree to do so. But again: not in scientifici papers. BTW: You'll never read that in climatology, as climatologists can only say what is significant and what is not and that is the only thing they do say.

climate change is a science fact: what wil happen to the prairie if temperatures rise in the next 20-70 years? Do we know that?

Another point I found is that prairies and especially infertile parts are abandoned. I am not 100% sure, bu that is what I read. If so: you need to manage more and mor ehabitat in order to keep the prairie the way it is. Still, globalwarming could change everything as many species are living within climatological boundaries.

But this is a good example of what ecology is: not scientific (read the par that rodents are considered bad, how is that scientific??) but ideological. They don't observe things only and give us therir impartial data, nope, they also tell us what we should think about it or feel that if others thinks likewise (farmers) etc this add to their findings somehow.

In short: this is in the line of ecology nowadays. Pick up 5 books on invasion ecology and you'll find little evidence (or even clear evidence to the contrary, like I did) but a whole lot of value laden wording. Now these words together to many people sound plausble, but in my mind they indoctrinate the students who read this on their university. And so they'll continue to do research this way with little evidence, little data on statistical significance but a lot of assumptions.

The reason I said it looked more like it was written by undergrads is because:

1) Much of the work appears to be "literature review".

2) As mentioned by jorginho, the work is full of "value laden" statements.

3) There isn't a specific date on the paper, just "Spring 2010". That makes me think its the work of a group of kids (also based on the list of names lower down) doing a project for the semester. A peer reviewed paper of scientific quality would have a specific date it was accepted by the reviewer.

4) As far as Dr. Price's name being on the list, usually for some kind of term paper, you would include the professor's name.

Here's another report with a similar title in the same directory http://www.k-state.edu/nres/capstone/ :
http://www.k-state.edu/nres/capstone/Redcedar_Report-F10.pdf

So we should dis-credit it as a paper written by a bunch of kids. Fine by me. I think that's what your after.

No body is trying to influence anyone here.

"Anybody from Kansas or the plains states want to chirp in on this"?

I did Both of you slam dunked it and I could give a rats a** what either of you two think.

This Juniper is in no way a threat to Kansas or any other surrounding state in close proximity. Why all the concern about this? A mute subject matter.

I wasn't trying to discredit it. Just trying to point it out, lest someone think otherwise. I *would* be nice to see something a little more higher on the science chain on the subject.

*more higher* doh redundancy!

Well...I'll leave it to you two to criticize each other. It looks like that is where this subject matter is headed.

Dave

Of course this is not peerreviewed! I have read many of peerreviewe dresearch and it proves what it says. It is a wonder that invasion ecology even get anything peerreviewed (well not, because the peers themselves have no problems with subjectivity).

An interesting study would be to show where the range of Virginia Juniper was in 1,000 AD vs what it was in say 1700 AD. ERC is quite at home in the prairie reigons and sooner or later may have spread further west. It may have been advancing all along, just very slowly.
As I understand it, the buffalo population from 1,000 AD to 1,600 AD was expanding and had recently spread to the east coast prior to the arrival of the English.
On our family farm in Louisiana, ERC only exists around house-places and regularly used roads where it has routine access to sunlight. Swamps/bottomlands were too wet and the regular forests suffocated it beneath the canopy of 90'-100' pines and oak.