Sunday Afternoon Post: Pine Barrens and Cacti

Most people are surprised to find out that grasslands and savannas exist well into places like New Jersey and Ontario.  In northern areas, such as this picture taken near Manistique, Michigan, savannas are usually referred to as "pine barrens".

The famous pine barrens of Long Island and New Jersey also fit the description of a pine savanna, and are some of the last remaining non-governmental undeveloped land in the eastern United States.  In Michigan and Ontario, pine barrens can be found wherever the soil is sandy and relatively low in relief.  The eastern upper peninsula happens to have many scattered pockets of such land, especially on the margins of some of the coastal sand flats (but not dunes, which are a different ecosystem altogether).  In Ontario, scattered pine barrens can be found along the lower drainage of the Petawawa River, a vast outwash plain that served as one of the last primordial glacial melting rivers.

I plan to bushwhack the area quite a bit in the coming year or so, as I plan to write my dissertation on the development and existence of Opuntia Fragilis in northern Ontario, Quebec, and the Ottawa valley.  Fragilis is a prickly pear cactus, and supposedly one of the most cold hardy in the world, having migrated north and east on the heels of glaciers from refugiae during the last glaciation.  I have a suspicion that it might be more widespread in our local barrens than has thus far been documented.  For those wondering, Michigan and Ontario have two species of native cactus, Fragilis and Opuntia Humifusa.

The Humifusa seen above is wrinkled and recovering from its winter dormancy.  This was taken at Kitty Todd Nature Preserve, part of the Oak Openings Region of the Toledo, Ohio area, though Oak savannas and Humifusa can be found scattered in remnants throughout southern Michigan and southern Ontario, as far north as Saginaw and Peterborough, where they transition out and are replaced by the pines.  Yet again, here we see the delightful mosaic and interconnected ecosystems that make up our continent, a world where pines, grasslands, and cacti meet in a marriage of seemingly distant partners.