Lost Prairies

I decided to look in the Environmental History discussion feed on H-Net because of my interest in the field. I came across an interesting post by David Todd in which he thanked everyone for their suggestions and submitted a link to all of the readings and resources he had found on the subject of Prairies and Plowing. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5l75vjh9n3g36rg/sUNHpI2xQ0/green-rev-dev-pesticides-invasives.pdf

I looked into the suggestions that had been made to David and went back two months to find a list of posts made by seven different people. The suggestions were made only one day after the original post had been made asking for help or suggestions as to where he could find information about the exact dates that prairies were sold to be turned into farm lands in Texas. The issue Todd was having was that any information he could gather would only give a rough date that the prairies were lost rather than exact dates. The first post gave him different links referring to crop sales which could be used to come up with some type of rough estimations. http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Environment&month=1211&week=b&msg=JhR%2bkXKXHF1QXXghnWLZsA&user=&pw=
The next post was by a person who had done a similar project in North and South Dakota and had suggestions as to resources that they had used in their research. http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Environment&month=1211&week=b&msg=x3FmDa5nBfd4iX3oKVkp/w&user=&pw=
Some people just suggested books on topics similar to what he was researching or suggestions of people to contact that may know more on the subject.

The list that Todd submitted the next month was extensive and he had obviously received a large amount of support from the discussion board. I was surprised to see how quickly people helped their fellow historian and also at the quality of the suggestions made. I couldn't believe how many people had done research on similar topics. It was great to see how supportive the community on H-Net can be when a person submits an intelligent research question.