Tag Archives: grazing

Trying to Create Something Different in the Nebraska Sandhills

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At our Niobrara Valley Preserve (NVP), we’re experimenting with prairie management techniques to see if we can create a wider range of habitat conditions than is found throughout much of the Nebraska Sandhills.  On many Sandhills ranches, pastures look fairly similar to each other in terms of vegetation structure.  That’s because Sandhills ranchers tend to be careful in their grazing management to avoid wind erosion that can cause “blowouts” of bare sand.  As a result, pastures are rarely grazed intensively enough to create wide expanses of bare ground.  If intensive grazing does happen, it’s usually on a small scale and/or for short periods of time, which allows for quick recovery of grasses.

The Nebraska Sandhills have tremendous innate heterogeneity.  Just in this photo, you can see areas of bare sand created by pocket gophers and/or other animals, habitat structure created by various kinds of plants, including grasses, wildflowers, yucca, and shrubs.  Vegetation height varies greatly across small areas.

Overall, the ecology of the Nebraska Sandhills seems very healthy.  It’s a huge and mostly intact grassland landscape, and because of the dry sandy soils, topography and diversity of vegetation, there is quite a bit of habitat heterogeneity that is independent of management.  As you walk across most Sandhills pastures, you will move through both short/sparse vegetation and taller/dense vegetation, and occasionally come across other structural components like yucca plants or plum thickets.  Wildlife and insect species can often find the habitat structure they need somewhere in that pasture, though it might be in a small patch surrounded by other habitat types.  That seems to be true even for many bird species, which have relatively large breeding territories.  As an example, in pastures with fairly tall vegetation, we often see and hear horned larks that are (apparently) nesting in a few small and scattered patches of the short vegetation structure they prefer.  Those patches of short habitat often occur in gravelly flat areas or in favorite feeding areas for cattle, where grass growth is weak because of frequent grazing.

This late July photo shows a portion of our west bison pasture that was burned this spring and has been grazed intensively by bison all year. Because bison are in the pasture year round, they had immediate access to the burned area and started grazing regrowth as soon as it was available.

We’re trying to figure out more about how management with patch-burn grazing or other similar grazing systems affects Sandhills ecology.  Patch-burn grazing has part of the management of our bison pastures at NVP since the early 1990’s.  Because of that, we know Sandhills vegetation can recover from fires that are followed immediately by season-long intensive grazing.  However, we still don’t know much about how many animal species might respond – positively or negatively – to the kind of large patch heterogeneity created by this kind of management.  Instead of pastures with interspersed small areas of tall and short vegetation, we’re trying to create large patches (500-1000 acre patches within 10,000-12,000 acre pastures) of each habitat type and then shift the location of those patches between years.

Plains sunflower (an annual) often becomes very abundant after fires because it germinates well in exposed soil and then thrives in the absence of strong competition from perennial grasses.  This is the current year’s burn patch in our east bison pasture, where plains sunflower tall and blooming, surrounded by short-cropped grasses.

Creating large patches of various habitat types could bring both advantages and disadvantages to different species.  As an example, large patches could create an abundance of resources that support larger and more viable populations of some animal species. On the other hand, a vole who likes thatchy habitat could wake up in the middle of a 1000 acre burn, and it would have to make a long dangerous trip to find a more suitable place to live.  Trying to evaluate those potential costs and benefits is a big challenge for us.

This landscape shot shows the abundance of plains sunflower across the entire burned patch.

One possible advantage of the kind of shifting mosaic of habitat approach we’re trying is that it helps avoid risks that come from having the same habitat conditions in the same place year after year.  Just as crop rotation can help avoid buildups of pests and pathogens, shifting habitat types from place to place could have important benefits.  For example varying the location of habitat types from year to year could limit disease outbreaks and help prevent predators or herbivores from building up large and potentially destabilizing populations.

Showy evening primrose, aka fourpoint evening primrose (Oenothera rhombipetala) where the prairie was burned in 2015 and grazed intensively in both 2015 and 2016.  This opportunistic biennial is taking advantage of a long period where grasses are weakened by prior intensive grazing and haven’t yet recovered.

The most intriguing part of our experimentation for me, though, is the idea that we could create large ‘recovery patches’ where grasses have been weakened by a full season of intensive grazing and the plant community is temporarily dominated by opportunistic, mostly short-lived plant species.  That combination of short grasses and tall ‘weedy’ wildflowers can provide excellent brood-rearing habitat for some birds and important structure for reptiles and invertebrates that need to regulate their body temperature by moving quickly from sun to shade as needed.  Studies in other landscapes have shown that this kind of recovery patch habitat creates pulses of high insect biomass, which could have numerous impacts – including the provision of an awful lot of food for wildlife.  In addition, if an abundance of opportunistic plants include species beneficial to pollinators, that could provide quite a bonanza of resources for bees, butterflies, and other insects.

Zoomed out

In most of the Sandhills, patches of  ‘weedy’ habitat tend to be in small, static and widely scattered locations such as around windmills or other places where cattle or bison frequently congregate.  We’re wondering what might happen if we created big patches of the same habitat type and shifted their location from year to year.  In our Platte River Prairies, patch-burn grazing (and similar strategies) has sustained prairie plant diversity over many years, but we haven’t looked closely for similar responses in the Sandhills.  In addition, we know a little about how birds respond to patch-burn grazing in the Sandhills, but not much about impacts on other species like lizards, pollinators, small mammals, or invertebrates.  Now we’re trying to collect data on the responses from all those different organisms.

The lesser earless lizard is often found in and around sand blowouts or other habitat patches with abundant bare sand.  Will they respond positively to much larger patches of sparse vegetation?  Can they successfully shift their population locations as we burn/graze new sites?

Will pollinators such as this plasterer bee (Colletes sp) benefit from higher abundances of flowering plants in big patches of Sandhills prairie that are recovering from season-long intensive grazing?

This is part of our east bison pasture that hasn’t burned since 2012, and has been only lightly grazed during that time period.  It should support a different array of wildlife and allow different plant species to thrive than more recently-grazed areas.  Providing a wide range of habitat types across the prairie seems beneficial for biological diversity, but we still need to test that idea in the Sandhills.

I’ve really enjoyed digging into all the questions we have about our attempts to create more habitat heterogeneity in the Sandhills.  We haven’t had time to answer many questions yet, but we feel like we’re at least creating something different than what exists throughout most of the Sandhills landscape.  A few years from now, we might conclude that the heterogeneity we created didn’t really result in any significant positive or negative impacts compared to what exists elsewhere.  If that’s the conclusion, we’ll move forward with that in mind.  On the other hand, we might find that there are some important positive (and/or negative) impacts of the shifting mosaic approach we’re testing.  In the meantime, it’s exciting to have the opportunity to try something different and watch what happens.  Stay tuned…

If nothing else, huge populations of Plains sunflower like this one in our west bison pasture provide a different (and I think beautiful) look to parts of the Sandhills landscape at the Niobrara Valley Preserve.

Should We Manage for Rare Species or Species Diversity?

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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 (Astragalus canadensis), pollinators, and many other components of prairie communities can be a major challenge. 

For those of you who aren’t ecologists, here are some important vocabulary terms you’ll need to know for this post. 

 1. Conservative species – plants or animals primarily restricted to “intact” or “high-quality” natural areas, as opposed to species that commonly occur in degraded habitats.

2. Species richness – the number of species found in a certain area. High species richness means there are lots of different kinds of plants and/or animals present

3. Species diversity – a kind of modified species richness that also takes into account the evenness, or relative abundance, of each species. When one site has a few dominant species and lots of uncommon ones, it is less diverse than another site with the same total number of species but with more evenly distributed numbers of individuals.

Imagine this situation:  You’re put in charge of managing a tallgrass prairie with thriving populations of several rare plant species.  The prairie is located in a highly fragmented landscape dominated by rowcrop agriculture.  The prairie has been managed with frequent spring burning for many years, and the populations of those rare plants has been pretty stable for at least the last couple of decades.  As you take over, the previous manager tells you she’d recently been considering management changes that might increase overall plant and animal diversity but would likely reduce the population sizes of some rare plant species.  You have to decide whether to stick with the existing management regime or try something different.  What would you do?

Culver’s root (Veronicastrum virginicum) is a conservative plant species found in a small subset of today’s tallgrass prairies.

It would be perfectly rational and defensible to stick with the strategy that has sustained healthy populations of rare plants for a long time.  Because those plants aren’t found at many other sites, prioritizing them in this prairie makes good sense.  However, before you lock in that choice, let’s consider some other information.

First, there is often an assumption that an abundance of rare plants is an indication that the rest of the prairie community is also intact and healthy. While that assumption seems logical, it’s not always the case.  A good example of this comes from an Illinois study by Ron Panzer and Mark Schwartz.  Their research in the Chicago region showed that neither the number of conservative plant species or rare plant species predicted the number of conservative or rare insect species at a site.  Instead, Panzer and Schwartz concluded that overall plant species richness was more important for insect conservation.

Plant diversity also helps support healthy populations of pollinators and herbivores (invertebrate and vertebrate) by ensuring a consistent supply of food throughout the year.  A wide variety of plant species allows pollinators and herbivores to find high quality food at all times, even though each plant provides those resources at different times of the season.  For this and other reasons, increasing plant species richness can increase both the abundance and diversity of animals, especially invertebrates.  In addition, managing for a variety of vegetation structure types (including a wide range of both plant stature and density) can also help support more animal diversity, including birds, mammals, reptiles, and insects.

Grazing can decrease the size of rare plant populations, especially in comparison to sites under repetitive haying or burning management. However, carefully planned grazing can also increase plant diversity and provide more varied habitat structure for wildlife and invertebrates.

Every species of plant and animal plays a certain role within the prairie community.  High species richness provides redundancy of function and helps ensure that if one species disappears or can’t fill its role, others can cover for it.  That contributes to ecological resilience – the ability of an ecological community to respond to stress without losing its integrity.  Ecological resilience may be the most important attribute for any natural system, especially in the face of rapid climate change, continuing loss and degradation of habitat, encroaching invasive species and other threats.

Aside from the benefits of managing for species richness, a strict management focus on the needs of a few species can put others at risk.  The use of prescribed fire, for example, provides a competitive edge to some plant species, but has negative impacts on other plants, as well as on some animals.  There have been vigorous arguments between advocates for frequent burning and people concerned about rare butterflies and other insects, as well as reptiles and other animals that can be extremely vulnerable to prairie fires.  Repeated intensive grazing by cattle or bison is another management strategy that favors some plant and animal species, but can negatively impact many others, especially without adequate rest periods between grazing bouts. Management that consistently provides favorable conditions for a few species at the expense of others may eventually eliminate some species from a prairie altogether, or at least reduce their ability to effectively contribute to ecosystem functioning.  If those losses lead to decreased ecological resilience, the resulting impacts may end up negatively affecting the same species a site manager is trying to promote.

Regal fritillary butterflies are very sensitive to fire, and can be eliminated from isolated prairies if the entire site is burned at an inopportune time. However, populations can also thrive in large prairies managed with a combination of fire and grazing, as long as sufficient unburned areas are available, and many of their favorite nectar plants (like this Verbena stricta) are common, or even weedy.

So, what’s the right path?  Should we prioritize management for rare or conservative species, assuming that other species don’t need as much help?  Or should we focus on species diversity and ecological resilience because we need the strongest possible natural communities in today’s challenging environment?  How should scale (size of prairie) influence decisions?

There are plenty of potential benefits and risks associated with each path, and I’m not here to tell anyone which they should choose.  In most cases, my own tendency is to focus on diversity and resilience, but I completely understand why managers would go the other way, and I think every situation needs to be evaluated independently.  For example, if a species is teetering on the brink of extinction and we need to keep it alive while we create more habitat elsewhere, I’m perfectly fine with prioritizing management to favor that species.

In other cases, I worry that we’re too sometimes unwilling to manage prairies in ways that promote changes in plant composition.  Years of repetitive management (especially frequent haying or burning) create conditions under which plant communities seem very stable.  However, that stability may be a response to consistent management rather than an intrinsic quality.  Allowing plant populations, even of rare species, to fluctuate in size, or even persist at a lower abundance than we’re used to is not the same as driving those species to extinction.  If rare species survive in smaller populations but the surrounding community is more resilient, that may be a win.  Having said that, reducing the size of rare species’ populations can make them more vulnerable to local extinction, and I don’t take that kind of risk lightly.  These are challenging issues.

This bottle gentian plant (Gentiana andrewsii) is an extremely conservative plant, and was growing in a hayed meadow in the Nebraska Sandhills where management conditions are very stable from year to year.

The hard truth is that we don’t yet understand enough about ecological systems to make these kinds of decisions confidently.  I understand the impulse to manage conservatively, sticking with what seems to have been working for a long time – especially in small and isolated prairies.  At the same time, I also think we need to build as much diversity and resilience in our prairies as we can – focusing on both plants and animals – especially in landscapes where we don’t have many left.  I’m glad managers are experimenting lots of different strategies, but we should all take responsibility for collecting data that help us evaluate our management, and keep open minds as we share what we learn with each other.  None of this is easy, but it is certainly important.