Click the link to read the article on the Writers on the Range website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

When President Joe Biden restored the original boundaries of both Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments in 2021, public-land lovers felt they had achieved a lasting victory.

Biden’s action reversed the Trump administration’s shrinkage of these protected areas in southern Utah, and once again put those spectacular canyons off-limits to mining and energy development. The victory was confirmed in August, when a federal court dismissed Utah’s lawsuit attempting to overturn Biden’s action.

But in some ways, the crucial work of preserving these places has just begun. The proclamations establishing and restoring the two national monuments are lofty documents that make the case for wielding the Antiquities Act to protect the landscapes in question. But the real test is always what happens on the ground.

We have a clearer picture of that now, because this August, the BLM released its draft resource management plan and environmental impact statement for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. The public has until Nov. 9 to make its wishes known.

The local environmental community sees the agency’s “preferred” alternative, which “emphasizes the protection and maintenance of intact and resilient landscapes …” as a vast improvement over the status quo. Though it’s less restrictive than one of the other four alternatives, this approach would significantly limit grazing, motorized vehicle use, and target shooting across the monument.

State and local politicians who subscribe to the Sagebrush Rebel ideology have been attempting to dismantle the national monument ever since then-President Bill Clinton established it in 1996. Neither Congress nor even the George W. Bush administration would accede to their demands, but over the years the monument has been starved of funds, lost valuable staff and its management has been influenced by the local culture, which is generally hostile to federal land management.

Then two decades after Grand Staircase-Escalante was established, Republican Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch convinced President Donald Trump to drastically shrink it. The legality of the move was questionable at best: The Antiquities Act gives the president the power to establish national monuments, but not to rescind or dismantle them. The Trump administration’s management plan also gutted protections for what remained — especially relating to grazing.

The livestock industry has long claimed that the national monument’s grazing rules would destroy local ranching. Yet Clinton’s proclamation clearly stated that grazing would continue under the existing BLM rules. In fact, the national monument helped a handful of ranchers who were ready to get out of the marginal business of running cows in inhospitable — yet beautiful and sensitive — terrain. The ranchers struck a deal to retire their grazing permits along the Escalante River and some of its tributaries in exchange for a generous cash payout from the nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust.

Even after the buyout, more than 95% of the monument remained open to livestock, and the number of cattle — or animal unit months — permitted on the monument is about the same now as it was in 1996. Today, though, fewer cattle run on nearly every permitted grazing allotment. It is clear that the livestock operators themselves are the ones limiting the number of cattle.

But here’s the problem: Biden’s restoration of the monument did not repeal the Trump-era plan that opened up retired grazing allotments. Now the public has an opportunity to do that.

The agency’s “preferred” alternative — which the document is quick to point out is merely a starting point for discussions — would divide the monument into four management areas, with different levels of development and access in each. Grazing allotments not currently under permit would be permanently closed to livestock. New range improvements would be limited or prohibited. And off-road vehicles would be banned from the Primitive Area and selected other areas and limited to designated routes in the rest of the monument. 

It’s a lot less than most conservationists were looking for. It would leave 85% of the monument open to tens of thousands of grazing cattle trampling fragile cryptobiotic soils. But Scott Berry, board president of the Grand Staircase Escalante Partners, a nonprofit founded to protect and preserve the monument, urges the environmental community to get behind the plan.

“Political forces in Utah are going to do everything in their power to prevent the new plan from being adopted,” he said, “which would leave the Trump (plan) the controlling authority.”

To comment, visit the Bureau of Land Management’s planning site by Nov. 9: https://eplanning.blm.gov/eplanning-ui/project/2020343/510 

Jonathan Thompson is a contributor to writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. His newsletter The Land Desk covers the region.

Click the link to read the article on The Revelator website (John R. Platt):

This year we bid farewell to two lost frogs, the Chinese paddlefish, a plant from New Hampshire, and many others.

Last July scientists in Texas announced some surprising news: They had rediscovered an oak tree species previously believed to be extinct. Until then the last known Quercus tardifolia tree was believed to have died more than a decade earlier. But lo and behold, one more tree was discovered in Big Bend National Park, meaning the species wasn’t extinct after all.

The rest of the news wasn’t as good: That lone tree isn’t doing so well. It’s been burned by fire and shows signs of a fungal infection. Scientists say it’s in need of “immediate conservation.”

This situation isn’t that atypical in the world of wildlife conservation, where species that have avoided extinction in the Anthropocene still need dramatic support. A recent study found that more than half of all known endangered species require targeted recovery efforts if they’re to avert “human-induced extinction.”

If that doesn’t happen, we’re going to lose more species — a lot of them. Despite rediscoveries like the oak tree in Texas, the world is still losing biodiversity at dangerously high rates. In 2022, scientists announced that they had given up efforts to find dozens of long-lost species, including two frogs, one of the world’s biggest fish, an orchid from Florida, a grass from New Hampshire and many others.

And those are just the ones we know about. Another 2022 study warned about the threat of “dark extinction,” the loss of species science has never even identified as having existed in the first place. By conservative estimates, millions of species are yet to be discovered, identified and named, and most are at risk of disappearing before that ever happens as humanity continues its relentless expansion. And if we don’t know they exist, we can’t do anything to save them.

So let’s take a moment to talk about the ones we do know that we’ve lost, to remember their names, to add them to the Book of the Dead, and to use their lessons to prevent others from suffering the same fate. We’ve compiled dozens of stories of extinction from the past year, including species that have been declared lost after many decades of looking, other species that have vanished from key ranges of their habitat, and others that are now extinct in the wild and exist only in captivity.

But before we get to those names, let’s take a lesson from the Endangered Species Act here in the United States — a law that turns 50 this year. Virtually every species that has been protected under the Act has had its extinction prevented. Some were added to the list too late, and they died out as a result. Many are still hanging on by a thread, but active conservation efforts are preventing them from disappearing any further. Many have recovered — most recently two plants from the Channel Islands — and more are likely to do so in the future. That is the ultimate lesson of the extinction crisis: It’s preventable if we work hard enough.

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Chinese paddlefish (Psephurus gladius) — The declared extinction of this iconic fish shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Last seen in 2003, these massive beasts — who reportedly reached up to 23 feet in length — were already on the decline due to overfishing and habitat degradation before the Gezhouba Dam was built in 1981. That dam cut off their migration route in the Yangtze River and doomed the species. People have been looking for them ever since but, given their gigantic stature and the fact that no one has spotted any in that time, the species was declared extinct this past year. As the only member of its genus, the Chinese paddlefish’s extinction represents the loss of an entire evolutionary line.

Yangtze sturgeon (Acipenser dabryanus) — An extinction in the making, or recovery on the cusp? Either of those could be the fate of the Yangtze sturgeon. No mature fish have been seen in the wild in years, and the species was declared extinct in the wild this year by the IUCN. Ongoing captive-propagation efforts have produced tens of thousands of young sturgeon, who are released annually into the Yangtze River, but so far that hasn’t paid off in terms of wild reproduction. The species initially declined due to a long list of threats, including overfishing, shipping, dams, pollution and other habitat degradations, and few of those dangers have faded. Those same threats affect all other sturgeon species: Two-thirds are now critically endangered.

Florida govenia (Govenia floridana) — This large orchid, native to Everglades National Park in Florida, was mistakenly identified as another species when it was first discovered in 1957. That delay in recognition probably doomed it. At the time of discovery, only 25 plants existed. Poaching probably quickly wiped them out before they could be protected. The IUCN declared the species extinct in 2022, decades after its last verified sighting in 1964.

Sharp-snouted day frog (Taudactylus acutirostris) — Gone in the blink of an eye. It took just five years for this once-common Australian amphibian species to decline and ultimately disappear, probably due to the deadly chytrid fungus, which is causing frog extinctions all around the world. Last seen in 1997, the day frog was declared extinct this past year following two decades of extensive searches.

Mountain mist frog (Litoria nyakalensis) — Another Australian frog, another probable victim of the chytrid fungus. This one was last seen in 1990, and extensive searches have failed to prove it still exists.

Saxicolella deniseae — Known from a single waterfall in the Republic of Guinea, this herb appears to have gone extinct after its only habitat was flooded during construction of a hydroelectric dam.

Raiatean ground partula snail (Partula navigatoria) and Garrett’s tree snail (P. garrettii) — These species from French Polynesia were nearly eaten into extinction by the notorious, carnivorous rosy wolf snail, an invasive species around the planet. The last live animals were found and brought into a captive-breeding program in the early 1990s. A reintroduction program began in 2016 at a site that (unfortunately) was later found to contain another predatory invasive species, the New Guinea flatworm. Pending the success of future reintroductions, these species have been assessed as extinct in the wild, joining other snails from French Polynesia in that purgatory-like category.

Jaguarundi (Herpailurus yagouaroundi) in the United States — One of the major regional extinctions on this year’s list. The jaguarundi, a small feline, was last officially seen in the United States — the northernmost part of its range — in 1986. In 2022 a major 18-year study reported no evidence the species still exists in the country and declared it ripe for reintroduction efforts.

Beilschmiedia ningmingensis — This tree was last seen in China in 1935, in an area that has long since been converted to agriculture and plantations. China already considered it extinct; the IUCN added it to the list of extinct species this year after extensive recent surveys.

Coote’s tree snail (Partula cootei) — Last seen in French Polynesia in 1934, this snail probably disappeared slowly as it hybridized with another introduced species. Researchers assessed it as extinct in 2017, but the information wasn’t published or added to the IUCN Red List until this past year.

White-handed gibbon (Hylobates lar) and northern white-cheeked gibbon (Nomascus leucogenys) — China formally declared both these primates extinct in the wild within their borders this past September, at least a decade after they were last seen in the country. Researchers blamed “human activities” (including hunting, deforestation and the pet trade) for their disappearance. Each species still exists in other countries in Southeast Asia, although the white-handed gibbon is endangered, and the northern white-cheeked gibbon is critically endangered.

Dugong (Dugong dugon) in China — These gentle manatee relatives, who are considered “vulnerable to extinction” through most of their range, have all but disappeared from China, another major extirpation for the country this year. A paper published in July declared dugongs “functionally extinct” in Chinese waters, meaning some of them still exist there but not enough to form a healthy population. This, according to researchers, represents “the first reported functional extinction of a large vertebrate in Chinese marine waters” and serves as a “sobering reminder” of the threats faced by other species.

Poecilobothrus majesticus — What little we know about this long-legged fly from the United Kingdom stems from a single male specimen collected on the Essex coast in 1907. Scientists didn’t taxonomically name it until 1976, and a 2018 report on UK flies of the Dolichopodidae family concluded that it was probably extinct, as “one would have expected them to have been encountered by now.” The IUCN added it to the Red List as extinct this past year.

Luciobarbus nasus — This fish was known from just a single river system in western Morocco, where it hasn’t been seen since 1874. Pollution from a nearby city may have done it in, but that remains unclear. Here’s the good news though: After years of scientific debate, this species has now been reclassified into four species, with three of them remaining in existence (and one of those endangered).

Chott el Djerid barbel (Luciobarbus antinorii) — When you use too much water, don’t expect fish to stay alive much longer. That’s what happened in Tunisia, where this rare fish disappeared sometime around the 1990s or 2000s. It was listed under the IUCN Red list as a data deficient for many years but was declared extinct in 2022.

Syzygium humblotii — This tree, a member of the myrtle family, hasn’t been seen in about 130 years. It grew in Mayotte, an overseas department of France located in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and Mozambique, in an area that has since been degraded by farms, livestock and other nonnative species. Searches over the past three decades have failed to turn up signs of its existence, so this year the IUCN declared it extinct.

Kalanchoe fadeniorum — Relatives of this long-lost Kenyan plant are grown as houseplants around the world. This species isn’t as lucky. Known from just one site, it hasn’t been seen since 1977. The areas surrounding where it grew aren’t very well surveyed, so scientists are hedging their bets and calling it “extinct in the wild.”

Heenan’s cycad (Encephalartos heenanii) — Every member of this plant genus (commonly referred to as bread trees or bread palms) is endangered due to overcollection, sometimes for food, sometimes for traditional medicine, sometimes just to own them. Previously listed as critically endangered, Heenan’s cyad was reassessed as extinct in the wild in 2022 due to “persistent pressure from plant collectors.”

Giant Atlas barbel (Labeobarbus reinii) — Although this Moroccan fish was last seen in 2001, it was listed on the IUCN Red List as “vulnerable to extinction” for several years. Well, that prediction has come true: This year the IUCN declared it extinct. It was known from just one small stretch of river that suffered from pollution and runoff from a nearby city, as well as a dam that separated populations. These factors undoubtedly affected the fish, but the exact reason for its extinction remain unknown.

Abrolhos painted button-quail (Turnix varius scintillans) — This Australian bird subspecies is known from just three islands. Now it’s down to two. The population on North Island in the Houtman Abrolhos Archipelago has been “eaten out of house and home” by introduced invasive species, which degraded the habitat. Researchers spent nearly 13,000 nights camera trapping the island between 2018 and 2021 and concluded in a 2022 paper that the bird no longer exists there. The quail is considered one of the five Australian species most likely to face extinction in the coming years, so this extirpation represents a major blow for its conservation.

Cystophora — Not one extinction, but many? A 2022 paper declares several species of this algae genus “functionally extinct” along the coast of southern Australia. At least seven species are reportedly now absent from the warmest edges of their historical range. The causes of their decline and disappearance are not known, but the paper cites slightly likely impacts from “gradual warming, marine heatwaves and rapid urbanization.”

Smooth slender crabgrass (Digitaria filiformis var. laeviglumis) — Known from a single park in Manchester, New Hampshire, this rare plant was last seen in 1931. The New Hampshire Natural Heritage Bureau declared it extinct this past June. Other varieties of the crabgrass species still exist in neighboring New England states, but this version was unique and is now considered lost.

Mollinedia myriantha — This Brazilian tree has a sad history. It was discovered in [1892], then lost for 123 years. A sole individual tree was rediscovered in 2015, but fieldwork conducted in the following years found that the lonely tree had died. Researchers officially declared it “critically endangered, possibly extinct” this past year. The same paper warns that the genus faces a wide range of threats and many species remain unassessed, meaning they too could soon face extinction.

Irrawaddy dolphin (Orcaella brevirostris) in Laos — The last individual of this species in Laos was found dead on Feb. 15. It had been injured by being caught in fishing gear — it escaped, but only after receiving injuries that left it unable to hunt. Irrawaddy dolphins remain in other countries, but the species is endangered, and its loss in Laos represents a major population gone.

And 562 more? — Proving an extinction is never easy — it’s easier to see something than it is to not see something. But many species have gone unseen for decades, and while scientists still look for them every year, hope begins to dwindle after a time.

Is it time to give up hope for 562 lost species? That’s the question raised by a paper published this May, which examines long-unseen species listed on the IUCN Red List. It identifies 137 amphibians, 257 reptiles, 38 birds and 130 mammals that have not been seen for at least 50 years and asks if that half-century of no sightings means they’re extinct. Maybe, maybe not. We need to be prepared for that possibility, but the paper suggests this analysis actually provides something positive: a way to prioritize geographic “hotspots” where scientists can target their searches for long-lost species.

In other words, let’s find these lost species while there’s still time.

Click the link to read the article on The Revelator website (Tara Lohan):

Some people call the Great Plains “flyover country.” Outdoor enthusiasts sail above it on the way to the mountains of Acadia, California’s redwoods or Utah’s red rock. Conservationists, too, have bypassed the region. Few big public preserves or parks exist there.

Ecologist Curtis Freese hopes that changes.

His new book, Back From the Collapse: American Prairie and the Restoration of Great Plains Wildlife, is a call to protect and restore the northern Great Plains and the biodiversity it once held in great numbers. That includes swift foxes, beavers, river otters, bison, elk, pronghorn, black-footed ferrets, grizzly bears, wolves and numerous species of grassland birds.

Some of that work is already underway. In 2002 Freese helped launch the nonprofit American Prairie, which aims to establish a preserve of 3.2 million acres in northeast Montana where the mixed-grass prairie has escaped the wrath of the plow that uprooted many other areas of the Great Plains. The group’s about halfway to its goal, with nearly 600,000 acres of deeded lands or leased public lands, along with 1.1 million acres of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.

“The region offers our best chance to reassemble the native wildlife community within a vast reserve large enough to preserve the ecosystem to its fullest potential,” he writes in the book.

The Revelator spoke with Freese about the biodiversity of the northern Great Plains, what it would take to restore native wildlife, and what obstacles remain.

Why do you think the Great Plains is often neglected when it comes to conservation?

I think there’s two main reasons. One was that compared to wetlands or forests or mountains, agriculture could simply get a quick jump on colonizing the Great Plains. You didn’t have to drain the wetlands, you didn’t have to clear the forest, you just opened the gates and let the cows out. It was all right there, ready to eat or plow.

Secondly, the turnover from 1870 to 1895 was dramatic. There had never been such a big change in the world so quickly — from an ecosystem where there was nothing but wild ungulates, to one that virtually eliminated all the ungulates and you had nothing but livestock. Because it was eliminated so quickly, there wasn’t a chance for the public to appreciate what had been — to say, “We need a big Great Plains park like Yellowstone.” We never had the chance.

What was the biodiversity of the region like before European colonization brought plows and cows? And how does that compare with what’s there now?

This was one wild, rambunctious system that went through a lot of ups and downs. We had glaciers covering it just 12,000 years ago. In the mixed-grass prairie it’s 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and sometimes it’s -50 degrees in the winter, so you’ve got to be tough to live there. Prairie wildlife exhibits that. Bison don’t need to go to water nearly as much as cows do.

When Lewis and Clark went through eastern Montana [in 1805-1806] they saw more wildlife than any other place in their trip — either to the east or to the west of the Rocky Mountains — all the way to the coast. It was just a remarkable ecosystem that we once had.

Now most of the species are either [greatly diminished] or not there at all, such as the wolf. Wolves now are in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, but back in the 1880s and 1890s, the state put a bounty on them, and every year roughly 4,000 to 6,000 wolves were killed, mostly in the plains of eastern Montana.

Today we’ve got relatively good numbers of deer because people like to hunt deer and they’re not quite so threatening to agriculture. But the elk numbers are highly suppressed because of depredation concerns about crop land, and pronghorn numbers are still down. The bison is simply a fraction of 1% of what it once was.

What’s the potential to be able to restore some of these populations of native wildlife?

What I see in northeast Montana — and what’s great about this ecosystem — is its diversity of habitat. You’ve got the Missouri River running through it. Then you’ve got floodplains and the rugged Badlands-like environment as you come out of the floodplain up into the rolling prairie. And then there are these isolated mountain ranges, like the Little Rocky Mountains, with pine forests. You have this wonderful cross section of habitats that support a great diversity of species. Some only live down in those floodplains. Some live in the rolling prairie, like the swift fox, and others live in the more mountainous and forested areas, like mountain lions.

The diversity of habitat is there, and much of it’s intact, but there’s still a threat of prairie being plowed up and put into wheat and barley. Once you plow it up, that’s the killer threat. Nothing survives very well in a wheat field.

Put bison out there [instead], they’ll double the population every three or four years, no problem. Three of the Indian reservations in the region have bison. Grasslands National Park just across the border in Saskatchewan has bison. But we need to create much bigger herds of bison to mimic what they once did to that ecosystem and support the diversity of grassland habitat by their grazing. So there’s a long way to go in terms of building back the wildlife numbers.

Some, like the black-footed ferret, have a real challenge ahead of them because prairie dogs, which are their main source of food, continue to be poisoned and shot. Another threat is an introduced disease that came decades ago from Asia and is highly lethal to prairie dogs, as well as ferrets.

Others are also going to take some extraordinary effort to bring back. With wolves and grizzly bears, the problem isn’t a lack of food — or as we say, the “ecological carrying capacity” of the environment. It’s the social carrying capacity — people’s tolerance for big predators. We need to have some innovative approaches to enabling these big predators.

What does recovery look like for native grassland birds, many of whom are also declining?

Ecologist Andy Boyce said that recovering birds should be the easiest. They don’t threaten anybody. They move around to find the best habitat. And yet we still have declining bird populations because of three main threats.

One is the ongoing conversion of grasslands to cropland. The problem there as much as anything is the huge farm subsidies that lead to more plow-up and conversion of prairie to cropland.

The second is homogeneous grazing. In rangeland management the idea is to have the cows eat half the grass and leave half the grass everywhere. Uniform grazing. Well, to a lot of birds, that’s the worst outcome because some birds like it grazed down to the ground. Other birds like it not grazed at all. If you’re a five-inch-tall bird, that difference in grass height is like the difference for us of walking through a forest versus the shrubland.

So we need bison, and sometimes fire, to go back and recreate that diversity of grassland habitat, which birds depend upon.

The third one that’s an increasing threat are the new neonicotinoid insecticides, which are shown to be highly toxic to migratory birds and pollinators like butterflies and bees.

What’s needed to boost conservation in the region?

There are three pillars of conservation in the Great Plains. The first is no more sod busting, no more conversion of grassland to cropland.

Number two is the ranching community needs to be much more friendly to prairie wildlife. A lot of ranchers do a good job. There’s a lot of good ranch management going on, but a lot of them don’t. For example, prairie dogs are still much maligned and not tolerated, and they don’t create that much of a problem for ranching. And we also still see bison as belonging behind a fence, which is nuts.

We need to have a new kind of approach to ranching that realizes wildlife like bison, big predators, and small animals like prairie dogs, all have a place. Ranching can provide corridors and safe passage between parks, refuges and reserves for wildlife to move through.

Then third, we’ve got to have big protected areas of a million acres or more. Those are the cornerstone of wildlife conservation, whether you’re in the Great Plains, the Amazon or the Arctic. So we need more places like American Prairie and the Charles M. Russell Refuge across the Great Plains if we want to restore and conserve everything from prairie birds to ferrets to large predators and ungulates.

We’ve got a lot of public lands in the Bureau of Land Management lands and National Grasslands, which are managed by the Forest Service. An act of Congress could convert those into more protected status.

Those places have a multiple-use mandate that includes biodiversity conservation. I think we simply have to provide greater weight to the biodiversity benefits of these public lands that belong to all the public, not just to the ranching communities that graze them. I think we need to have a shift in attitudes about what the best use of these lands is. And I think in a lot of cases, these public lands, the best use is for wildlife biodiversity conservation.

In just the Great Plains alone, we’re spending $10 billion a year to subsidize farming. What if we just took 10% or 20% of that and we apply it to buying and conserving grasslands?

Private lands have got to be part of the solution too, because especially in the southern Plains, almost all the lands are private lands.

A third part of the solution is Tribes. Indian reservations are engaging in wildlife restoration as well.

American Prairie, working with the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, can serve as a place where the American public can visit a landscape of an endless sky and wildlife with no fences, the likes of which you won’t see unless you go to the African Serengeti now. It used to be the African Serengeti in the Great Plains. Once people experience that, it’s going to be a revelation of, “Yes, we could have this, we could restore it.”

Julia Kuzovkina, University of Connecticut and John Campanelli, University of Connecticut

Spring is planting time for home gardeners, landscapers and public works agencies across the U.S. And there’s rising demand for native plants – species that are genetically adapted to the specific regions where they are used.

Native plants have evolved with local climates and soil conditions. As a result, they generally require less maintenance, such as watering and fertilizing, after they become established, and they are hardier than non-native species.

Many federal, state and city agencies rank native plants as a first choice for restoring areas that have been disturbed by natural disasters or human activities like mining and development. Repairing damaged landscapes is a critical strategy for slowing climate change and species loss.

But there’s one big problem: There aren’t enough native seeds. This issue is so serious that it was the subject of a recent report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The study found an urgent need to build a native seed supply.

As plant scientists who have worked on ecological restoration projects, we’re familiar with this challenge. Here’s how we are working to promote the use of native plants for roadside restoration in New England, including by building up a seed supply network. https://www.youtube.com/embed/S98HAyDfOwY?wmode=transparent&start=0 Landscapers and land managers explain the benefits of planting native plants.

The need for native plants

Many stressors can damage and degrade land. They include natural disasters, such as wildfires and flooding, and human actions, such as urbanization, energy production, ranching and development.

Invasive plants often move into disturbed areas, causing further harm. They may drift there on the wind, be excreted by birds and animals that consume fruit, or be introduced by humans, unintentionally or deliberately.

Ecological restoration aims to bring back degraded lands’ native biological diversity and the ecological functions that these areas provided, such as sheltering wildlife and soaking up floodwater. In 2021, the United Nations launched the U.N. Decade on Ecosystem Restoration to promote such efforts worldwide.

Native plants have many features that make them an essential part of healthy ecosystems. For example, they provide long-term defense against invasive and noxious weeds; shelter local pollinators and wildlife; and have roots that stabilize soil, which helps reduce erosion.

Restoration projects require vast quantities of native seeds – but commercial supplies fall far short of what’s needed. Developing a batch of seeds for a specific species takes skill and several years of lead time to either collect native seeds in the wild or grow plants to produce them. Suppliers say one of their biggest obstacles is unpredictable demand from large-scale customers, such as government and tribal agencies, that don’t plan far enough ahead for producers to have stocks ready.

Restoring roadsides in New England

Most drivers give little thought to what grows next to highways, but the wrong plants in these areas can cause serious problems. Roadsides that aren’t replanted using ecological restoration methods may erode and be taken over by invasive weeds. Ecological restoration provides effective erosion control and better habitat habitats for wildlife and pollinators. It’s also more attractive.

For decades, state transportation departments across the U.S. used non-native cool-season turfgrasses, such as fescue and ryegrass, to restore roadsides. The main benefits of using these species, which grow well during the cooler months of spring and fall, were that they grew fast and provided a quick cover.

Then in 2013 the New England Transportation Consortium – a research cooperative funded by state transportation agencies – commissioned our research team to help the states transition to native warm-season grasses instead. These grasses grow well in hot, dry weather and need less moisture than cool-season grasses. One of us, John Campanelli, developed the framework for selecting plant species based on conservation practices and identified methods for establishing native plant communities for the region.

We recommended using warm-season grasses that are native to the region, such as little bluestem, purple lovegrass, switchgrass and purpletop. These species required less long-term maintenance and less-frequent mowing than the cool-season species that agencies had previously used.

To ensure sound conservation practices, we wanted to use seeds produced locally. Seeds sourced from other locations would produce grasses that would interbreed with local ecotypes – grasses adapted to New England – and disrupt the local grasses’ gene complexes.

At that time, however, there was no reliable seed supply for local ecotypes in New England. Only a few sources offered an incomplete selection of small quantities of local seeds, at prices that were too expensive for large-scale restoration projects. Most organizations carrying out ecological restoration projects purchased their bulk seeds mainly from large wholesale producers in the Midwest, which introduced non-local genetic material to the restoration sites.

Improving native seed supply chains

Many agencies are concerned that lack of a local seed supply could limit restoration efforts in New England. To tackle this problem, our team launched a project in 2022 with funding from the New England Transportation Consortium. Our goals are to increase native plantings and pollinator habitats with seeds from local ecotypes, and to make our previous recommendations for roadside restoration with native grasses more feasible.

As we were analyzing ways to obtain affordable native seeds for these roadside projects, we learned about work by Eve Allen, a master’s degree student in city planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For her thesis, Allen used supply chain management and social network analysis to identify the best methods to strengthen the native seed supply chain network.

Her research showed that developing native seed supplies would require cooperative partnerships that included federal, state and local government agencies and the private and nonprofit sectors. Allen reached out to many of these organizations’ stakeholders and established a broad network. This led to the launch of the regional Northeast Seed Network, which will be hosted by the Massachusetts-based Native Plant Trust, a nonprofit that works to conserve New England’s native plants.

We expect this network will promote all aspects of native seed production in the region, from collecting seeds in the wild to cultivating plants for seed production, developing regional seed markets and carrying out related research. In the meantime, we are developing a road map for new revegetation practices in New England.

We aim to build greater coordination between these agencies and seed producers to promote expanded selections of affordable native seeds and make demand more predictable. Our ultimate goal is to help native plants, bees and butterflies thrive along roads throughout New England.

Julia Kuzovkina, Professor of Horticulture, University of Connecticut and John Campanelli, PhD Student in Plant Science and Landscape Architecture, University of Connecticut

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Christine Peterson):

One day about a decade ago, professional tracker and cougar researcher Michelle Peziol took a group of graduate students from Teton Science School on a walk through an aspen grove near Jackson. GPS in hand, Peziol led the class to an area where a collared mountain lion had been spending time. 

As the bright sun illuminated the early summer grass at the site, Peziol noticed an almost perfect circle of darker-green grass. She looked around. Nothing obvious would have caused the grass in that precise location to be richer and more robust. Then she remembered: A lion had killed a deer in that spot the prior year. Could the remains of that deer kill have fertilized the soil? 

Ten years later, Peziol and four other researchers published the answer: Yes, it could. 

A new paper in the journal Springer Nature outlines how mountain lions in the Tetons create areas with more protein-rich grasses that nourish big game when the leftovers of carcasses they kill and consume decompose. Lion researcher Mark Elbroch calls it a version of “gardening to hunt,” but to Wyoming Game and Fish large carnivore section supervisor, Dan Thompson, the results further illustrate just how connected every species — from lions to deer to beetles to grass — are to one another. 

“As far as mountain lion management, [this research] reinforces their role in the ecosystem,” Thompson said. “It’s important because we’re one of the few places in North America where it’s still occurring like it used to.” 

As hunters and outfitters fret about predators killing big game like mule deer after a particularly harsh winter, researchers say projects like this highlight how much more there is to learn from the role each species — predators included — play on the landscape. 

Killing, eating and stealing

Each of Wyoming’s large carnivores come with a buffet of preconceived notions about how it kills, what it eats and its role on the mountains and plains of Wyoming. Some generalities prove true: Wolves tend to kill in packs while mountain lions and grizzly bears, for example, are solo hunters. But while many assume the large predators kill and eat only live, big game, science is increasingly proving otherwise. 

Groups like the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team show grizzly bears eat more than 260 species within four animal kingdoms, including ants, moths, elk, bison, 175 types of plants and one species of algae. Wolves, meanwhile, eat primarily elk, deer, a whole host of small animals like rabbits and beaver and sometimes even berries. Mountain lions, often viewed as the most likely to stalk and kill a deer or elk wandering through the woods, will just as readily stalk a raccoon, a goose or a skunk. And depending on the area, up to 20% of a mountain lion’s diet consists of already-dead critters they happened upon, Thompson said.  

Of the meals that lions kill, they share (often not willingly) with hundreds of other species on the landscape. 

“Everything from weird things like flying squirrels and mice to the usual suspects, like bears and eagles and turkey vultures,” said Elbroch, one of the paper’s co-authors and the Puma Program director for Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organization. “What that really speaks to is how energy moves in the system and how it strengthens an ecosystem by creating all these new links and food webs.”

This doesn’t mean cougars kill game and simply move along, Thompson said. Lions will eat as much as they can. 

“There’s no evolutionary benefit of killing for fun,” Thompson said. “There’s no benefit in wasting food.”

But the research shows that even goopy bits of carcasses that seep into the earth before they are consumed can produce surprising results years later. After years of mapping GPS location data and collecting soil samples, Peziol’s team began to piece together a picture of how those carcasses influence the quality of the soil itself. 

Connections from the ground up

Finding answers to big ecological questions requires more than a field season or two, Peziol said. It takes years of collecting information from the same locations and, in the case of this study, returning to the University of Washington with a U-Haul full of dirt. 

Once Peziol and Elbroch decided to investigate the connections between lions and vegetation, Peziol began the long process of collecting thousands of samples from the Wyoming mountains. 

The work began with lion collars, which sent location points to a satellite every one to two hours. If a lion stayed in a location for more than four hours, it could mean it was eating or napping. So Peziol started trekking to those locations to find out. If it had killed and cached an animal, Peziol took soil samples from directly underneath the carcass as well as 10 feet away in areas with the same conditions like sunlight and slope. 

She repeated the process every three months for a year, then twice a year for three years. When vegetation began to grow at the carcass site, she plucked samples of those plants and samples from the same nearby species, again growing in similar conditions. 

A U-Haul of dirt, thousands of individual samples and 13 undergraduate students analyzing soil and plant quality later, she could prove that plants growing where carcasses decomposed had higher quantities of protein. 

While the same benefits may arrive from species hunted by humans — if the carcasses remain in the woods and aren’t schlepped to a landfill — the lion affected areas tended to be located in certain zones where mountain lions preferred to hunt. 

That means pockets of better-quality vegetation proliferate in select areas on the landscape, Elbroch said, potentially drawing even more big game to those areas. 

“To use trendy science language, we were able to definitively show that mountain lions were ecosystem engineers, and that they were creating habitat for other species,” Elbroch said.

However, knowing if, in fact, deer and elk return to those areas because of the better vegetation would entail more research not of lions, but of deer and elk themselves. 

The study results remind Thompson of migrating salmon and how their decomposing bodies change water pH and add to soil nutrients, which then boosts vegetation growth that attracts more grazing animals that then bring more predators. 

“It’s more than lions killing deer,” Thompson said. “It’s very easy to try to simplify the reality of what’s happening on the landscape, and by doing so we don’t give credit to these very intricately woven natural occurrences happening around us.”Tagged:WyoFile App

Christine Peterson has covered science, the environment and outdoor recreation in Wyoming for more than a decade for various publications including the Casper Star-Tribune, National Geographic and Outdoor… More by Christine Peterson