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Science Update ArchivesNovember 14, 2008 Science Update page
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| Phil Gerla drawing water sample at Glacial Ridge for testing. Photo © Chris Anderson/TNC |
Conservation of native habitat and enhanced biological diversity comprise the primary goal for ecological restoration at the Glacial Ridge Project/National Wildlife Refuge in northwestern Minnesota.
Reconstruction and restoration of hydrology and wetland habitat continue to expand across the 24,000-acre project area, but Judicial Ditch (JD) 66 poses a problem—most of its flow, which averages 85 gallons per minute, comes from a gravel pit that will operate for a few more decades.
The water is colder and more mineralized than water elsewhere at Glacial Ridge. The flow is constant throughout much of the year and has significantly increased the volume of water entering the watershed since the pit was developed in the 1980s.
Currently, the discharge from the pit flows into a wide channel with almost no slope. Water ponds in the channel, causing the slopes to fail and invasive weeds to flourish.
Crops have been planted up to the edge of the ditch, permitting the transport of fertilizer, pesticides and soil into the water. Downstream, dissolved fertilizer and suspended sediment degrade water quality.
As part of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Environmental Contaminants Program, The Nature Conservancy and students at the University of North Dakota have been monitoring the quality of groundwater and surface water for 18 months.
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| Cross section of ditch designs. © TNC |
Plans are in place for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to begin construction on a retrofit for the ditch this spring. The banks of the ditch will be excavated and the wide channel partially filled, creating a wetland bench. Flow will be confined to a narrow, deep channel typical of natural low-slope streams.
Students from the University of Minnesota-Crookston and the University of North Dakota will help collect thousands of living plugs of native wetland vegetation from existing wetlands and transplant these into the new stream bench and banks.
Seeding with a diverse mix of native species, funded through a Native Buffer Cost-Share Agreement with the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources and the East Polk Soil and Water Conservation District, will supplement the transplants.
We predict that herbaceous wetland vegetation, once established, will slowly lead to overhanging banks that will create increasingly diverse aquatic habitat. Furthermore, enhanced interaction of groundwater and water in the channel will mitigate the transport of dissolved nutrients downstream.
Prairie and wetland vegetation will form a buffer, thereby curtailing erosion and downstream transport of soil and sediment.
Finally, and perhaps most important, we hope the project will demonstrate possible ways that the tens of thousands of miles of agricultural ditches in the Red River basin can be readily transformed to enhance habitat, increase diversity and improve water quality while maintaining their intended function.
Interagency Grassland Monitoring Team Completes Second Successful Field Season
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| (l-r) Conservancy land steward Rob Self works with Sarah Margoles, Sara Simmers and Mei Ai Khoo on assessing structure and composition of a prairie remnant at Brown Ranch in the Sheyenne Delta of North Dakota. Photo © Meredith Cornett/TNC |
Following a training attended by more than 30 natural resource professionals, the Interagency Grassland Monitoring Team completed its second field season.
Altogether, ecologists from The Nature Conservancy, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service visited 50 remnant prairies in Minnesota and North Dakota. Rapid assessments were completed for approximately 5,000 acres.
The goal of the monitoring is to determine broad plant composition and structural changes over time in response to a suite of land management techniques including grazing, burning and haying.
Interagency Grassland Monitoring Project
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| Attendees at grassland monitoring workshop, July 2008. Photo © Meredith Cornett/TNC |
In July, 2008, more than 30 participants gathered for a grassland monitoring workshop in Glenwood, Minnesota. The group spent the morning on field methods for assessing structure and composition in native grasslands. In the afternoon, training in data management and entry into a common database was provided. The database was developed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service especially for this innovative project.
The Interagency Grassland Monitoring Project represents an unprecedented collaborative effort to evaluate the condition of prairie remnants throughout the Northern Tallgrass Prairie and Prairie Forest Border.
A joint effort between the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, The Nature Conservancy, the US Geological Survey and the Forest Service, the group will inventory thousands of acres of native grasslands in 2008.
The project was designed to track changes in native grasslands over time, and to compare the effectiveness of fire, grazing, and haying treatments in accomplishing long-term management objectives.
Glacial Ridge Science Conference 2008
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| Phil Gerla presenting at 2008 Glacial Ridge Science Conference. Photo © USFWS |
In September 2000, The Nature Conservancy purchased Tilden Farms, a 24,500-acre tract of agricultural land that straddles beach ridges of Glacial Lake Agassiz, formed about 10,000 years ago.
The Glacial Ridge Project site offered a means to connect and greatly expand several thousand acres of important and well-established conservation lands managed by non-profit, state and federal agencies. Wetland drainage, farming, ranching and aggregate mining during the last 120 years have extensively altered this original tallgrass prairie.
During the last seven years, The Nature Conservancy and the Natural Resources Conservation Service, in association with many other partners, have either reconstructed or restored most of the former wetlands and uplands, making it perhaps the largest-ever prairie restoration. On October 12, 2004, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service received deed to 2,300 acres, establishing the 545th National Wildlife Refuge, which will ultimately cover about 35,000 acres.
A meeting held March 6, 2008, brought together more than 70 researchers, scientists, engineers and technical staff involved in this remarkable reconstruction and restoration project. Twenty-two presenters, including Phil Gerla, highlighted the project’s successes and challenges in restoring vegetation, hydrology, soils and fauna. Keynote speakers included Dr. Carter Johnson (South Dakota State University) and Dr. Susan Galatowitsch (University of Minnesota).
Adaptive Management – What is the State-of-the-Art in Grasslands?
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| Photo © TNC |
Following a successful pilot season of collaborative grassland management, The Nature Conservancy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources participated in a two-day workshop: “Adaptive Management on National Wildlife Refuges – Testing New Methods,” hosted by the USFWS Morris Wetland Management District.
The workshop was held November 14-15, 2007, and was funded and led by the USFWS Biological Monitoring Team. It was designed to speed the process of learning which land management actions work best in a given landscape. Adaptive management helps to structure the problem and evaluate potentially competing approaches. The emphasis of the November workshop was on options for managing native grasslands, including fire, grazing and a combination of both.
By engaging in a dynamic Structured Decision Making (SDM) process informed by data collected during the pilot field season, participants laid the groundwork for choosing among the management options in the future. Optimal approaches will be identified and updated every few years based on real data from field tests.
This structured process is similar to the way that doctors evaluate new treatments for cancer and other diseases. Although a single doctor may have only one patient with the disease, several doctors can cooperate and learn faster as a result, via clinical trials. More updates will be available as the process unfolds.
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| Workshop participants work on mapping ecological characteristics of the Turtle River, a priority aquatic conservation within the Northern Tallgrass Prairie Ecoregion in North Dakota. Photo © Meredith Cornett/TNC |
Recent research by Dodds and others (BioScience 54(3):205-216, 2004) shows that prairie streams are highly endangered, but provide an essential component in regional biodiversity and the continuum of prairie habitat.
The Nature Conservancy’s work in the Northern Tallgrass Prairie of western Minnesota and eastern North and South Dakota concentrates on the upland prairie and wetlands in the region.
The rivers, streams and other waterways have not been a focus. Nevertheless, aquatic targets appear on conservation action plans, and land stewards and other conservation scientists may be unfamiliar with indicators of condition and monitoring techniques for prairie streams.
To learn more about aquatic communities and related issues, twelve Conservancy staff from the region gathered for a two-day field workshop at Turtle River State Park in northeastern North Dakota in early August 2007.
Led by Phil Gerla, a conservation hydrologist with the Conservancy and associate professor of geology at the University of North Dakota (UND), participants spent time wading and surveying the Turtle River learning about stream and river morphology, classification and assessment methods.
Field and classroom discussion focused on the challenges of stream and river target indicators and monitoring techniques that are an integral part of the Conservancy’s conservation action plans. UND graduate student Abigail Franklund, Dr. Greg Vandeberg, a fluvial geomorphologist at UND and Dr. Andre DeLorme, professor of biology at Valley City State University, added expert instruction on rapid assessment, water quality analysis and macroinvertebrate identification.
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| Blanket flower © Phil Gerla/TNC |
Monitoring our land management to determine its effectiveness is a key part of The Nature Conservancy’s day-to-day science activities. During the 2007 field season, Conservancy scientists and partners will be gathering data on a number of exciting land management projects throughout Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. Measuring our success on the ground helps us to tell our stories to members, donors and the broader community of scientists and land managers. We’ll be taking the pulse of the projects listed below, and many others:
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Do ecologically-based grazing systems helping maintain the native plant diversity of tallgrass prairie ecosystems? (Prairie Coteau, Agassiz Beach Ridges, Ordway-Glacial Lakes, Sheyenne Delta)
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Are our large-scale prairie and wetland restoration efforts resulting in diverse native plant communities? (Glacial Ridge)
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Is it necessary to combine prescribed fire and mechanical treatments to reverse aspen encroachment, or is it a more efficient use of resources to rely on prescribed fire alone? (Tallgrass Aspen Parkland)
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How has a legacy of forest management impacted the structure and composition of mixed conifer-hardwood forests? (Manitou Forest Landscape)
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Can we use biological controls to control yellow toadflax? (Leola Hills/Missouri Coteau).
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| Mark White monitoring effects of prescribed fire, Lake Alexander in central MN © Colin McGuigan/TNC |
Local science and stewardship creates the heart and core of The Nature Conservancy’s work, but we need ways to better link our local on-the-ground / in-the-water action to global conservation. In response, more than 300 Conservancy science and stewardship staff met in Tucson, Arizona in November 2006 for the Conservation Science in Practice Conference. The meeting focused on how science contributes to better conservation at all scales, with an emphasis on tactics to address major threats at multiple scales, ranging, for example, from global climate change to local invasive species or fire management.
The Minnesota-Dakotas Chapter was well represented. Pete Bauman, Prairie Coteau Field Steward, and Director of Conservation Meredith Cornett summarized 10 years of experience in controlling leafy spurge, a noxious weed that destroys rangeland. Phil Gerla, a conservation hydrologist with the chapter, reported on research that reveals the effectiveness of prairie restoration on downstream peak flow reduction following snowmelt and heavy rain. Mark White, Forest Ecologist, presented two talks: one on modeling the effect of climate change on northern forests and another on monitoring conservation objectives in forested landscapes using remote sensing and field data. Land Steward Russ Reisz and Meredith Cornett demonstrated how remote sensing can be used to evaluate the effect of mechanical and prescribed fire on reversing aspen encroachment. Eric Rosenquist, Cross Ranch Preserve Manager, along with colleagues from the Montana chapter, described adaptive management techniques aimed at recovery efforts for piping plovers.
The conference included three days of plenary talks, contributed symposia, talks, posters and training/workshop sessions that led to effective “cross pollination” between conservation scientists, and stewards and practitioners working at all scales from throughout the U.S. and world.
Ecological restoration offers tools that are complementary to the Conservancy’s conservation work. The challenge lies in selecting among a vast array of options, from replanting habitats to restoring ecological processes, such as fire or flooding. How do we make decisions about which will have the biggest impact? Even more importantly, how much is enough as we reconstruct habitat or reintroduce processes?
The answers to these questions are evasive. Conservation practitioners nonetheless need clear objectives that drive us to reach toward larger scales and new approaches. In other words, we must assemble the best available scientific information and make an effort to establish measurable objectives for conservation.
To address these thorny questions, the Conservancy uses a multi-step process called Conservation Action Planning (CAP). We are pleased to report that the Minnesota chapter is in full swing with a series of CAP workshops for six conservation areas in the Prairie Forest Border and Superior Mixed Forest Ecoregions: Brainerd Lakes, Lake Alexander, Ordway/Glacial Lakes, Avon Hills, Weaver Dunes, and the Root River. Each workshop brings together Conservancy staff and partners to develop an ambitious suite of conservation actions that will help us to achieve results on the ground and in the water over the next 10 years. The fourth and final workshop in the series will take place in February 2007. Stay tuned!
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