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Introduction and Research Problem
What becomes visible when scientists map a prairie? Which relations do they obscure, and which conditions do they privilege? This paper examines how the production of ecological knowledge and the organization of conservation assistance shape access to the Alabama Black Belt Prairie Initiative (ABBPI), a five-year-long, $17.5-million program to restore prairie on private lands. Centrally, this paper is concerned with how landscapes become legible to scientists and the state, and whether that recognition encompasses the people and relationships through which land is owned, managed, and tended.
The Black Belt Prairie is an endangered landscape that exists today only as a patchwork of remnant tracts. Heirs’ properties, meanwhile, are family-owned lands held jointly by descendants, resulting in “tangled titles” that complicate legal transfer and often preclude participation in grant and assistance programs. Read together, prairie remnants and heirs’ properties reveal shared conditions of marginality produced by history rather than neglect.
The project began by testing the hypothesis that heirs’ properties have functioned as ecological refugia, protecting prairie remnants from development due to the legal and financial constraints of tenancy-in-common ownership. Ecological and ethnographic fieldwork conducted during summer 2026 tested this proposition while opening a broader inquiry into conservation access. Who can participate in these programs? Who stands to benefit from them? And how might conservation policy operate differently within landscapes characterized by collective rather than individual tenure?
These questions connect everyday uncertainty about tenure, resources, and participation with uncertainty in the knowledge that informs planning priorities. Namely, to what degree does the recorded geography of the Black Belt Prairie reflect the distribution of the ecosystem, and to what extent does it reflect the socio-scientific processes through which prairies become known?
Conceptual Framework
The research brings environmental history, the cultural meanings of collective tenure, and scientific representation into a common frame. It treats ecological and property conditions as historically constituted relations whose significance cannot be fully understood through either biological surveys or ownership records alone. Throughout the literature on Black Belt Prairie remnants and heirs’ properties, an emphasis is placed on their marginal status. What remains of the prairies can be found along roadsides, in powerline rights-of-way, around churches, and throughout abandoned pastures, in addition to preserved natural areas. Environmental histories of the region situate these remnants within long histories of human activity and landscape change (Peacock & Schauwecker, 2003; Schotz & Barbour, 2009).
A corresponding inquiry into heirs’ property distinguishes the vulnerabilities produced through property law and unequal access to resources from the meanings that cotenants attach to collective ownership. Ethnographic studies have demonstrated that common familial property is often associated with ideas of freedom and self-determination, important cultural values for African American families with roots in the Deep South. Moreover, such properties also function as a kind of informal social safety net by serving as a physical and economic refuge for family members—whether near or far, close or extended—who find themselves in need (Bownes & Zabawa, 2019; Dyer & Bailey, 2008).
Recognizing these relations does not diminish the legal and economic vulnerabilities of heirs’ property. Instead, it questions whether addressing those vulnerabilities requires treating collective tenure itself as a condition to be eliminated. A more-than-human perspective extends this relational approach to prairie, directing attention to the interactions among people, other species, and situated practices of care (O’Gorman & Gaynor, 2020). Representation acquires political consequence when ecological knowledge informs conservation priorities. The framework therefore asks what surveys and administrative categories reveal, what they leave unresolved, and how those distinctions affect whose land and stewardship receive public support.
Methods
The investigation combined GIS-based spatial analysis, ethnographic and ecological fieldwork, and critical cartography, supplemented by archival research at the University of Mississippi. Prior to travel, I compared existing Black Belt Prairie surveys against county parcel maps and tax-assessor data to identify potential sites of overlap. This proved useful but necessarily imprecise. Heirs’ properties can be difficult to identify through public records, meaning the spatial analysis functioned primarily as a means of locating candidate sites for further investigation. Fieldwork then became a process of ground-truthing both sides of the proposed relationship—determining whether suspected sites exhibited prairie characteristics and, through conversations with landowners, whether those lands were indeed held collectively and how they had been managed in the past.
During summer 2026, I spent several days shadowing botanist, ecologist, and Black Belt Prairie expert Alfred Schotz of Auburn University. While visiting and documenting prairies together, I learned how to identify Black Belt Prairie through indicator species, soil conditions, and landscape characteristics. Alongside this ecological work, I conducted semi-structured interviews with landowners about property histories, land-management practices, relationships among cotenants, familial attachments to land, and knowledge of the Alabama Black Belt Prairie Initiative. The fieldwork included interviews with twelve landowners and the collection of six soil samples. Site visits and conversations also informed an assessment of what existing maps and records could—and could not—establish.
Participant privacy shaped the graphic representation of these relationships. Because parcel size, shape, and location could identify participants (a particularly concerning and dangerous hypothetical when dealing with heirs’ properties), diagrams required the abstraction of boundaries and other identifying features while retaining enough information to relate properties meaningfully to prairie remnants and surrounding geological and infrastructural conditions.
Results
Fieldwork identified three instances of Black Belt Prairie on heirs’ property, including one previously unaccounted for by ecologists studying the ecosystem. This limited but nonzero overlap supports the existence of the proposed spatial relationship but does not validate the initial hypothesis that collective tenure systematically preserved prairie. Black Belt Prairie does occur on heirs’ property, including at sites identified through this research, but much extant prairie occurs on other forms of property, while many heirs’ property sites examined during this investigation had no apparent extant prairie. At present, there is little basis for suggesting a strong causal relationship between the two conditions.
Comparing prairie surveys with county-level parcel and tax data revealed limits in identifying ecological remnants and cotenants. Designations including “heirs of,” “estate of,” and “et al.” obscure cotenants’ identities and the social relations that govern land management. These limits became evident when records were compared with conditions encountered in the field. Previously undocumented prairie on heirs’ property, alongside the prominence of large tracts in existing surveys, raises questions about where researchers have looked and which properties they have been able to access.
Fieldwork also raised questions about the cultural landscape in which prairie conservation occurs. Several landowners understood native prairie vegetation less as an ecological resource than as something weedy, overgrown, or indicative of poorly maintained property. These observations suggest that conservation operates within existing norms of what it means to be a responsible landowner and what a properly maintained rural landscape should look like. Landowners’ responses therefore complicated the assumption that recognizing prairie would necessarily produce interest in conserving it.
One of my most consequential conversations was with an heirs’ property cotenant who works with other families to secure their land and return it to productive agricultural, forestry, or conservation use. He described a “clustering” model through which smaller landowners coordinate across property boundaries to become more competitive in securing vendors for timber harvesting, pine planting, controlled burns, and other management practices. This practice demonstrates an existing capacity for coordination across small properties; its application to prairie restoration remains a proposition for further investigation.
Discussion and Conclusion
Three findings organize the discussion. First, the limited overlap of prairie and heirs’ property establishes their occasional spatial coincidence without demonstrating that collective tenure systematically preserved prairie. Second, ecological surveys and property records provide incomplete accounts of both ecosystems and the social relations through which land is managed. Third, landowners’ existing practices of coordination offer a basis for investigating conservation across property boundaries, although their effectiveness for prairie restoration remains untested.
The more significant outcome of the fieldwork was, therefore, not confirmation of the original hypothesis but its complication. In particular, the investigation shifted my attention from what collective tenure might inadvertently have preserved toward what its social and organizational structures might make possible. Rather than treating fragmented tenure exclusively as a barrier that must be regularized before conservation can occur, the fieldwork suggested that existing practices of coordination, consensus, kinship, and collective care might themselves provide infrastructure for conservation.
Recognition as a conservation priority, however, does not itself ensure the capacity to participate. The ABBPI provides rebates on the installation costs of conservation practices (Alabama Soil & Water Conservation Committee, n.d.). Such arrangements raise a question of access to upfront capital, even where landowners are eligible and willing to participate. Scientific recognition, administrative eligibility, and practical capacity are consequently distinct conditions of conservation access. An initiative may acknowledge a property's ecological significance while leaving its cotenants unable to undertake restoration. This is a potential exclusionary mechanism, rather than an established finding about the program's distribution of funding.
Ecological significance as defined by conservationists does not necessarily map cleanly onto how landowners understand, value, or prioritize their land and its relations with larger environments. Planning responses must therefore attend to landowners’ priorities as well as the financial and organizational conditions of participation. Clustering suggests one way to investigate whether technical support and conservation assistance could work through existing relationships across property boundaries. Still, such an approach must remain attentive to the vulnerabilities associated with heirs’ property, rather than assuming that collective stewardship resolves insecure tenure or unequal access to capital (Zabawa et al., 2023).
The next phase of this research will require expanding the number and diversity of properties studied while more closely examining how scientific knowledge, cultural expectations of land stewardship, conservation incentives, and collective tenure shape what ecological restoration can become in the Black Belt. The current research contributes to planning under everyday uncertainty by showing how incomplete ecological and administrative knowledge intersects with uneven capacities to act. Its emerging proposition is that conservation should recognize both the land it seeks to restore and the social relations through which restoration becomes feasible and legitimate.
References
Alabama Soil & Water Conservation Committee. (n.d.). Alabama Black Belt Prairie Initiative. https://alabamasoilandwater.gov/blackbelt/
Bownes, T., & Zabawa, R. (2019). The impact of heirs’ property at the community level: The case study of the Prairie Farms Resettlement Community in Macon County, AL. In C. J. Gaither, A. Carpenter, T. Lloyd McCurty, & S. Toering (Eds.), Heirs’ property and land fractionation: Fostering stable ownership to prevent land loss and abandonment (General Technical Report SRS-244, pp. 29–43). U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Southern Research Station. https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/62092
Dyer, J. F., & Bailey, C. (2008). A place to call home: Cultural understandings of heir property among rural African Americans. Rural Sociology, 73(3), 317–338. https://doi.org/10.1526/003601108785766598
O’Gorman, E., & Gaynor, A. (2020). More-than-human histories. Environmental History, 25(4), 711–735. https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emaa027
Peacock, E., & Schauwecker, T. J. (Eds.). (2003). Blackland prairies of the Gulf Coastal Plain: Nature, culture, and sustainability. University of Alabama Press.
Schotz, A. R., & Barbour, M. S. (2009). Ecological assessment and terrestrial vertebrate surveys for Black Belt prairies in Alabama. Alabama Natural Heritage Program, Auburn University. https://www.auburn.edu/cosam/natural_history_museum/alnhp/publications/documents/prairie_swg_final_report.pdf
Zabawa, R., Green, J. J., & Sweeney, E. Y. (2023). Introduction to the special issue on heirs’ property. Journal of Rural Social Sciences, 38(1), Article 3. https://open.clemson.edu/jrss/vol38/iss1/3/