Catching up on my reading

Now that we are back from Arizona, and the weather is not good for the kind of brush work we need to do at Pleasant Valley Conservancy, I am spending my time doing background reading on oak savannas. Mainly I am reading some of what might called "ephemeral" literature, since it is not published in regular journals. A lot of this is U.S. Forest Service work that gets published in their General Technical Reports, of which a huge batch can be found on the 4th floor of Steenbock Library. Fortunately, all of these publications are indexed in MadCat, and will come up if you do a keyword search.

Google Scholar is another source, although once you make a "hit" you generally only get to read the abstract. A far better way of searching is to use JSTOR, the Scholarly Journal Archive which pulls together full text of a huge number of scholarly journals, including 53 botany titles and 71 ecology titles. These are complete runs, back in many cases to the 19th century, and you can search all of them or only one or two at a time. Those of us at the university have free access, but there should be a way for Prairie Enthusiasts and others see these.

Another source, which is open to everyone, is the U.W. Digital Collections archive, which has, for instance, the full text of all of the North American Prairie Conferences. You can reach this Collection via Google, or you can access it directly from this link. The UWDC interface takes a little getting used to, but once you figure out how it works, you have access to a lot of important literature. For instance, all of the Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters are available full text and completely searchable. A lot of the early Wisconsin flora was published in this journal, and it goes all the way back to the 19th century. All of the Technical Publications of the DNR are also available through UWDC, including some important prairie publications by Henderson and Cochrane!