Conservation, Restoration, and Management of Great Plains Landscapes

Abstract

The settlement and domestication of the Great Plains is essentially complete. The most spectacular large mammal concentrations on the continent have been almost entirely destroyed. In the span of about four human generations, the Plains’s former inhabitants have been conquered and the landscape greatly changed. Relative to the western mountains and deserts, the Great Plains has almost no large wilderness areas and relatively little publicly owned land exists. Of these, the largest tracts are in designated national grasslands that are managed chiefly for livestock grazing. The tallgrass prairie has been largely replaced with row crop agriculture, transportation corridors, and urban development. Wetlands in the Prairie Pothole region have been drained and put into agricultural production. Much of the shortgrass prairie in the western half of the region is still intact, but the native mammals have been replaced with cattle and other livestock. But, even on the High Plains where rainfall is low, irrigation has allowed large areas of grassland to be plowed and converted to grain crop production.