Urban natural areas are imperative players in offering environmental education opportunities to the public, along with providing necessary ecosystems goods and services including clean air, water, and creating a sense of place. In post industrial areas such as Chicago, developing natural spaces from abandoned land that once housed companies like US Steel, can prove to be challenging, especially since many of there areas were manmade through lake deposits and soil trucked from other cities. As restoration projects become more common, comparing soils and vegetation quality of potential restoration sites to those already restored is important to understanding how urban prairie ecosystems adapt to the oddities of these created landscapes. Some of the questions I'm asking include:  How does soil composition relate to the quality of the prairie? How does soil composition of already restored sites compared to unrestored sites? What is the ecosystem functionality of these ‘novel ecosystems’? How can these atypical soils be transformed into an effective public natural space that maximizes ecosystem function?