The Grassland Restoration Network is a loose affiliation of people trying to use prairie restoration (reconstruction) as a way to rebuild, conserve and sustain grassland ecosystems.  Each year, we put on a workshop to share ideas, techniques, research results, and stories with other.  Workshops are hosted by a different site each year, giving us the opportunity to visit a range of projects over the years.  We were happy to host the workshop here in Nebraska in 2016.

A discussion in front of cardinal flower and a restored wetland during the 2016 Grassland Restoration Network at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies.

The 2017 workshop will be held at Konza Prairie (Kansas) on July 11-12, 2017.  This will be a great opportunity to learn from the intensive and impressive array of prairie research going on at this Kansas State University research site.  They have done research specifically on prairie restoration, but also a lot of other work that relates closely to the kinds of challenges faced by those of us working to restore grasslands.  The Hubbard Fellows and I made a trip to Konza back in 2014, and I wrote three blog posts about the trip and still didn’t feel like I covered everything we learned and discussed.  You can read those blog posts here, here, and here.

Please mark these dates on your calendar and stay tuned for more information to come (probably in April).  This workshop will be limited on space, and priority will be given to people actively working on, or studying, large scale prairie restoration.