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The Kind of Conferences I Learn Best From
Last week, Eliza wrote a nice post about the value of professional conferences, and how much she’s learned by attending several of them during her time as a Hubbard Fellow. It’s great to know that...
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Photo of the Week – January 9, 2014
Earlier this week, I found myself lying on my back in the tight crawlspace beneath a house at our Platte River Prairies, helping our land manager fix a ruptured water line. For this claustrophobic...
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Assessing Prairie Restoration Through the Eyes of Small Mammals – Part 1
We’ve taken another step in the right direction… Over the last several years, we’ve begun to evaluate our prairie restoration work beyond just looking at plant communities. Our primary objective for...
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A Primer on Soil Microbes – An Interview with Sarah Hargreaves
Most of us who work in prairies think mostly about what we see aboveground. I guess that’s understandable, but to ignore the complex and critical functioning of the soil and its inhabitants is to...
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Photo of the Week – April 3, 2014
This week, I present four photographs from one of the timelapse cameras along a restored wetland in our Platte River Prairies. All four photographs were taken automatically by the camera, and none are...
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Photo of the Week – April 18, 2014
A couple weeks ago, I posted a few photos from the timelapse cameras at a restored wetland on our Platte River Prairies. One of those showed the first documented use by sandhill cranes of that site,...
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Photo of the Week – June 12, 2014
While I was in Iowa last week, I took advantage of some free time just before sunset to return to one of the restored (reconstructed) prairies we’d visited earlier in the day at the Kellerton Wildlife...
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How Do You Evaluate Your Prairie?
The most challenging aspect of prairie management may be evaluating what’s happening on the land and what to do about it. What should you focus on as you walk around a prairie? Which plant species...
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Our New Mechanical Seed Harvester
Seed harvest is a big part of our work here at the Platte River Prairies. We don’t do as much complete restoration (converting cropland to high-diversity prairie) as we used to because we’ve just...
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Karen’s Wetland Videos
One of my favorite places within our Platte River Prairies is a restored wetland we usually call “the sandpit wetland” because it is a former sand and gravel mining pit. We restored the site over...
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Media Coverage of Our Restoration Work
Our friends at Platte Basin Timelapse (PBT) created a very nice radio piece about our restoration work that aired on NET Radio (Nebraska Educational Telecommunications) today. The link below includes...
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Grassland Restoration Network – Minnesota Style
I am writing this from Moorhead, Minnesota, where our crew is attending the annual Grassland Restoration Network workshop. This year’s workshop is being hosted by The Nature Conservancy’s Bluestem...
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Chuck Norris of the Prairie
A big topic of conversation at this year’s Grassland Restoration Network (GRN) workshop had to do with designing seed mixes to combat potential invasive plant problems. When converting cropland to...
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Hubbard Fellowship Post – Ruminations While Disking
This post is written by Kim Tri, one of our two Hubbard Fellows for this year. Kim is an excellent artist, as well as an ecologist, writer, and land steward. As you can see, her drawings of animals...
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Plant a Prairie February 13!
This post was written by Evan Barrientos, one of our Hubbard Fellows. Have you ever explored a restored prairie and stopped to marvel at how the site was once a cropfield? Do you ever wonder how that...
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Hubbard Fellowship Post – Community-Based Stewardship and Long-Term Management
This post is by Eric Chien, one of our 2016-17 Hubbard Fellows. Eric hails from Minnesota, with an undergraduate education from Bowdoin College in Maine. He has a strong background in prairie...
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A Milestone for Prairie Restoration
Because conservation work can sometimes seem like blowing into the wind, it’s important to pause periodically to celebrate progress. For example, I am really excited about what has been accomplished...
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Should We Manage for Rare Species or Species Diversity?
Land managers constantly make difficult decisions without really knowing the long-term consequences of their choices. Balancing the sometimes conflicting needs of rare plants like Canada milkvetch...
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Photo of the Week – March 24, 2017
Below are two photos of a creek and associated wetlands taken by a timelapse camera. The first photo was taken in early June, 2015 and the second photo was taken about a month later. Looking just at...
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How Small Is Too Small?
What’s the minimum effective size of a prairie? For example, can a prairie be the size of a kitchen table? Let’s say someone converted a landscape full of prairie to an immense gravel parking lot,...
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