Abstract
The modifying influence of civilized man on natural vegetation is so rapid and so extensive that it becomes a difficult problem after a century or more to picture the original vegetation cover. The task is still more difficult when one attempts to express the vegetation in quantitative terms. Today the taxonomists scour the railway right-of-way for specimens of prairie plants for the prairie itself with its plant sociology has vanished. We will never be able adequately to reconstruct this vegetation complex, and we can only with difficulty draw its former boundary. Even though the surveyors of the original United States land survey, whose records form the basis of this study, made copious notes on prairie areas, it is likely that sedge-meadow type of vegetation was included under their classification of "wet prairie." If the term actually described areas dominated by typical prairie grasses, then Indiana at that time had wet prairie, dry prairie and a transition type of prairie and forest association, park-like in nature, which might be called oak openings.
