by Scott Schrage | University Communication
“…then you should care about grasslands.”
To speak with the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s Dirac Twidwell is to hear the sentiment emerge as a sort of mantra. The reasons preceding the statement, and behind the sentiment, are legion. Protecting signature species from extinction. Maintaining the quality of air and aquifers. Mitigating wildfires and floods. Preserving cultures and livelihoods that echo across generations.
It’s for those reasons that the associate professor of agronomy and horticulture has spent years researching and combating the decline of grasslands, especially the one just a few hundred miles to his northwest: the Nebraska Sandhills. That distance, as relatively short as it is, represents the gulf between what Nebraska is and what it was even a few hundred years ago.
What it was, what the Sandhills remain, is what an ecologist would call a temperate grassland: a mostly treeless, grass- and wildflower-covered region that grounds the surrounding ecology and culture. Or, as Twidwell would describe it, one of the last “true prairies.” Researchers have known for a while that many grasslands, whether temperate or tropical or desert, are shrinking in size or outright disappearing from the planet. But few had tried to quantify the full extent of that disappearance, or the extent to which certain grasslands have resisted it.
“There has not been a complete focus on grassland systems or rangeland systems,” said Rheinhardt Scholtz, a colleague of Twidwell’s and postdoctoral associate of Nebraska. “Grasslands get lumped together in a soup bowl with other vegetation types, and most of the focus goes to the ‘charismatic’ biomes — like tropical rainforests, for instance.
“Grasslands are, in fact, the least protected and most under threat. We reiterate that all the time — but the situation continues to get worse over time.”
Twidwell and Scholtz recently sought not just to clarify the global scope of grassland decline, but to identify the grassland regions that remain whole enough to stand a reasonable chance of being preserved well into the future.
Read the full story at Nebraska Today at https://go.unl.edu/s62a.
More details at: https://go.unl.edu/s62a