Places We Protect in Kansas

Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve

Today, less than 4 percent of the original tallgrass prairie remains, with a majority found in the Flint Hills of Kansas. A new cooperative partnership with the Conservancy, the National Park Service and the Kansas Park Trust will oversee the development, operation and promotion of the preserve. Encompassing some 11,000 acres in the Flint Hills, the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve has become the only privately owned national preserve in the country.

Cheyenne Bottoms Preserve

Cheyenne Bottoms is a complex of marshy basins in a 41,000-acre lowland area containing the largest system of wetlands in Kansas. These wetlands make Cheyenne Bottoms the top shorebird spring migration staging area in the contiguous United States.

Smoky Valley Ranch

Located in western Kansas, this 16,800-acre ranch is predominately a shortgrass prairie characterized by large grassland areas, dramatic chalk bluffs and rocky ravines overlooking the Smoky Hill River.

Konza Prairie

One of the finest examples of tallgrass prairie in the United States, Konza Prairie is a field research station for the Kansas State University Division of Biology. Scientists and students from around the world come here to study prairie environments and a gain a greater appreciation of our ecological resources.

Flint Hills Initiative

As part of the Conservancy's ongoing efforts to preserve the Flint Hills landscape, the Kansas Chapter initiated a community-based conservation program-the Flint Hills Initiative-which involves multiple strategies to abate critical threats in the greater Flint Hills of Kansas and Oklahoma.

Flint Hills Tallgrass Prairie Preserve

This 2,188-acre tallgrass preserve is home to several hundred plant species and numerous bird species, including the greater prairie chicken and Henslow's sparrow.

Anderson County Prairies

Native tallgrass prairie on this preserve provides habitat for part of the world's largest known population of globally-threatened Mead's milkweed.