The Ohio £J\Caturalist , 
PUBLISHED BY 
The Biological Club of the Ohio State University. 
Volume XIII. FEBRUARY, 1913. 
No. 4. 
- L 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
Schaffner— The Characteristic Plants of a Typical Prairie..65 g 0 - 
Schaffner— The Classification of Plants, VIII. 70 
Fuilmer— Additions Made to the Cedar Point Flora During the Summer of 1912. 78 ® 
Humphrey— The Ohio Dogbanes. 79 
THE CHARACTERISTIC PLANTS OF A TYPICAL PRAIRIE.* 
John H. Schaffner. 
The characteristic plants of a typical prairie give to it an 
appearance immediately recognizable whether it is climatic or 
edaphic. If one had carefully prepared lists of the important 
plants of prairies in various part of the great Mississippi basin, it 
would be comparatively easy to select the plants of general 
distribution from those confined to special areas. 
The prairie described below, not from an ecological but simply 
from a floristic standpoint, is situated in the center of the North 
American prairie province about one hundred miles east of the 
center of the transition zone to the plains region, in Clay County, 
Kansas. This region has never been glaciated and the surface 
rocks belong to the characteristic Dakota Sandstone. 
The eastern limit of the transition zone is about forty miles to 
the west and may in this region be placed at the eastern limit of 
the range of the prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus) and the 
agricultural ant (Pogonomyrmex occidentalis), both of which are 
characteristic and abundant animals of the plains. 
In the prairie under consideration there is, of course, some 
admixture of plains plants, but it is, nevertheless, a typical climatic 
prairie. The grasses which give color to the region are of the 
yellow-green type in summer and of a characteristic brown tint 
when dry, in winter. The color of the prevailing plains grasses 
is a grayish green, turning to grayish white in winter. These 
colors contrast sharply with the dark green of the pastures and 
meadows of Poas now largely developed in the eastern states. 
* Contribution from the Botanical Laboratory, Ohio State University 
No. 72. 
65 
