It's easy to do: Mow it once a year, in late summer, to prevent brush and trees from establishing. Remove the mowings, and never fertilize - or you'll have nothing but grass. It can take a few years and some helpful seeding, but the results are worth it.
Edited to add: since the wildflowers are native, you also never have to water.
There just aren't that many animals that thrive in a dense forest. Trees are hard to eat.
A natural forest - not the managed ones with just a couple of species - is absolutely teeming with life.
However, there is something in between nutritionally poor wildflower grassland and thick dense forest and I feel those hit the sweet spot.
Finally, I feel biodiversity is often given so much value that we don't even think about the amount of life anymore. It turns out that some ecologically managed grasslands do have a high number of species, but just not a lot of each one, whereas an open forest can harbor way more animals.
This makes sense: there is just not a lot to eat when you only have wildflowers on the menu.
- In a temperate forest, basically nothing eats canopy foliage. Maybe they did when we had mastodons and forest elephants, but we don't now. Trees grow, die, and get eaten by fungus.
- In grasslands, nearly 100% of the photosynthesized energy is available to megafauna.
Deer simply can't eat the bark of adult trees, or get to the leaves. Yes, some trees drop a lot of nuts, but it's nothing compared to what a prarie can support (aka, millions of bison).
Forests canopy is a very, very living biome for pollinators however. You’ll find birds, insects (and small mammals) in droves over the canopy but no “megafauna” indeed.
Francis Hallé work on forests, canopies and trees architecture is fascinating and insightful. He’s one of the creator of the “radeau des cimes”, an aerostat designed to study the canopy.
Bonus point: forest tends to retain water much better than grassland and therefore are less prone to drought.
you're gonna have to cite this claim
> Forests perform important buffering functions, such as cooling effects, the interception of precipitation, and water infiltration and retention.
https://www.fao.org/sustainable-forest-management/toolbox/mo...
do you have something i could read that supports this claim? it's my understanding that grasslands create more habitat and food compared to a closed canopy forest.
> Forests contain much of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, including insects, birds, and mammals
https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/five-major...
You’ll find insects in the (rich) soil, on the tree barks, on they leafs and on the canopy; bird make nest and shelter on and inside trees, sometimes with twigs and others debris; mammals lives in burrow between the roots and climb trees and eats their fruits and foliage.
> contain much of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity
"much" that's like not science
Rainforests are as dense as they come and absolutely the peak of biodiversity on this planet (on land anyway, underwater is a whole other ballgame). They’re one of the only environments humans can survive in with literally nothing but knowledge of the plants and animals around you.
https://www.lonelyplanet.com/news/hallerbos-forest-belgium-b...
It may be the case that a small amount of trees is beneficial overall for pollinators but if you’re managing an area as described then it takes a bit more work to plan for trees and mow around them.