Skip to main content
Advanced Search

Filters: Tags: Private land owners (X) > partyWithName: Plains and Prairie Potholes Landscape Conservation Cooperative (X)

30 results (63ms)   

Filters
Date Range
Extensions
Types
Contacts
Categories
Tag Types
Tag Schemes
View Results as: JSON ATOM CSV
thumbnail
This carbon sequestration research is part of a new pilot grassland conservation program to protect at-risk grasslands from conversion to cropland in the northern Great Plains. Natural resources partners have leveraged more than $3 million in private and federal funding to support an innovative program that extends protection of privately-owned grasslands that have expired under the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). In the past two years alone, the number of CRP acres nationally has dropped from 31.2 million to 27 million. Of the 4.2-million-acre-decline, lands lost in North Dakota and Montana accounted for 1.6 million acres, or 38 percent. The program aims to encourage private landowners to conserve CRP grasslands...
thumbnail
The Williston Basin, located in the NorthernGreat Plains, is experiencing rapid energy developmentwith North Dakota and Montana being the epicenter ofcurrent and projected development in the USA. Theaverage single-bore well pad is 5 acres with an estimated58,485 wells in North Dakota alone. This landscapeleveldisturbance may provide a pathway for the establishmentof non-native plants. To evaluate potentialinfluences of energy development on the presence andabundance of non-native species, vegetation surveyswere conducted at 30 oil well sites (14 ten-year-oldand 16 five-year-old wells) and 14 control sites in nativeprairie environments across the Williston Basin. Nonnativespecies richness and cover were recorded...
thumbnail
The project will utilize a 4.5 million acre study area on the Montana Glaciated Plains. The objectives are to (1) identify environmental conditions and management practices that will maintain habitat for grassland birds but not impact ranching sustainability, and (2) identify areas on the landscape that have the greatest conservation potential for grassland birds. This spatial analysis will provide the framework for a rigorous assessment of management actions on the Montana Glaciated Plains.
thumbnail
Federal assistance is being provided to develop a coordinated, standardized, and incremental monitoring strategy to apply an adaptive management approach to habitat conservation projects located in the Upper Mississippi River Basin (UMRB). To accomplish this goal, recipient intends to indentify scope of current monitoring efforts and identify gaps in monitoring needs related to aquatic habitat restoration in the UMRB, address key resource challenges, provide coordination services to partners, and develop and implement a landscape scale strategy for monitoring habitat restoration projects within the UMRB. These actions will help far beyond the scope of Fishers and Farmers Partnership (FFP) and the Plains and Prairie...
thumbnail
Rural America has changed dramatically over the last century, from having over half the population living in rural settings to only 20 percent residing in a rural area today, and outmigration of younger populations from rural communities remains a constant issue for local governing officials. A declining tax base and concurrent rising costs for maintenance and repair of aging infrastructure add further challenges to policy decisions. Reduced enrollment has caused school closures or mergers. Farm consolidation and technical advances reduced the demand for local labor. On the positive side, however, record-high commodity prices have amplified farm income to new heights. The increased revenues can lead to farmers spending...
thumbnail
Rapid expansion of cropland threatens grassland ecosystems across western North America and broad-scaleplanning can be a catalyst motivating individuals and agencies to accelerate conservation. Sprague’s Pipit(Anthus spragueii) is an imperiled grassland songbird whose population has been declining rapidly in recent decades.Here, we present a strategic framework for conservation of pipits and their habitat in the northern GreatPlains.We modeled pipit distribution across its million-km2 breeding range in Canada and the U.S.We describefactors shaping distribution, delineate population cores and assess vulnerability to future grassland losses. Pipitsselected landscapes with a high proportion of continuous grassland...
thumbnail
The Matador Ranch Grassbank is the most successful grassbank in the country, annually incentivizing conservation actions on over 200,000 acres of participating ranches. Incentives for management actions are in the form of discounts, which reduce the cost of leased grazing at the Matador Ranch. One of the required discounts for participating in the grassbank is a ranch management plan that guides grazing and benefits natural communities and the wildlife dependent upon them. This report details the results of our work to assess resource conditions and craft management plans with eight ranches on over 113,000 acres. Our analysis found that overall ranches implemented grazing management practices that maintained ecological...
thumbnail
This report provides a final update of work performed for the period beginning December 20, 2010 and ending December 31, 2012. The report describes two umbrella projects: (1) to improve fish passage and landscape connectivity for native species and 2) to determine the thermal effects on fish species sensitive to climate change. The work was performed through a partnership led by the Western Transportation Institute at Montana State University and the Bozeman Fish Technology Center (BFTC) of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. The report is divided into five chapters that provide details on accomplishments to meet specific objectives outlined in our proposal during the period. Several of the projects that...
thumbnail
In this thesis I explore a derivation of the MSAM using the DDO survey method to create a multispecies dependent double-observer abundance (MDAM) model. I use this tool to explore how two widely used grazing systems affect the abundance of eight songbird species with varying reliance on grassland vegetation in a sagebrush ecosystem.
thumbnail
The best hope for recovering and maintaining ecosystem function and services for the tallgrass prairie ecosystem is reconstruction. To that end, tallgrass prairie reconstruction efforts are on-going across federal, state, and non-profit organizations and among private landowners throughout the upper Midwest. Despite this heightened activity, a framework for comprehensive evaluation and adaptive learning from past reconstruction efforts is lacking. With an increasing percentage of already limited natural resource budgets being applied to reconstruction activities, it is imperative that we make the best use of these funds by developing best practices for reconstructions. The growing number of completed reconstructions...
thumbnail
A strategy has been suggested for developing regionally specific Rapid Assessment Methods (RAMs) to evaluate wildlife-related issues associated with wind development at specific sites. The RAMs are anticipated to be appropriate for use in situations identified as Tier 1 (preliminary evaluation or screening of potential sites) by the Federal Advisory Committee to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. A Rapid Assessment Methodology specifically for the U.S. portion of Bird Conservation Region 11, the Prairie Pothole Region, has been developed as a pilot test of the strategy. It has been reviewed by several individuals familiar with the wildlife issues of the region. Discussions are underway regarding integrating the...
thumbnail
In the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) wetland plant, invertebrate, and waterbird productivity are primarily driven by water-level dynamics in response to climate cycles. Large proportions of wetlands in the PPR have been drained, often consolidating water from smaller to larger-interconnected wetlands. This project will examine whether large basins that receive inflow from consolidation drainage have reduced water-level dynamics in response to climate cycles than those in undrained landscapes, resulting in relatively stable wetlands that have lower densities of invertebrate forage for ducks and shorebirds. We will also include a sample of wetland historically used by piping plovers to assess the threat of consolidation...
thumbnail
Livestock grazing practices are managed by private landowners and federal and state agencies across the western U.S. Increasingly, grazing strategies by these entities are incorporating conservation objectives and developing goals that include livestock production that is compatible with wildlife conservation objectives. This project evaluates the impact of conservation-oriented, rest-rotation livestock grazing and climate changes on migratory bird species associated with sagebrush habitat to better inform grazing management practices. Rest-rotation grazing management is likely to enhance important components of sagebrush, shrubland, and grassland habitat for a wide range of species, but little work has been done...
thumbnail
Estimating species abundance is important for land managers, especially for monitoringconservation efforts. The two main survey methods for estimating avian abundance are point counts and transects. Previous comparisons of these two methods have either been limited to a single species or have not included detection probability. During the 2012 breeding season, we compared and assessed the efficiency (precision for amount of effort) of point count time of detection (PCTD) and dependent double-observer transect (TRMO) methods based on detection probabilities and abundance estimates of five species of songbirds that use a range of habitats in a prairie system in Montana dominated by sagebrush and grassland vegetation....
thumbnail
Conversion of grassland restored under the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) back into croplands is occurring at a rapid rate at CRP contracts expire. A fee-market approach may be necessary to incentivize preservation of these restored grassland by assessing value to ecosystems services such as carbon sequestration.
thumbnail
Temperate grasslands are among earth’s most imperiled ecosystems. In North America,steep declines of endemic songbird populations indicate that grassland loss and degradation may be approaching critical levels. Grasslands are agricultural landscapes largely (~85%) under private ownership with little formal protection status. Remaining bird populations depend on grazing lands that have not been converted to cropland. We combine regional data from a hotspot for grassland bird diversity (northeast Montana,USA; 26,500-km2) with continental data spanning the northern Great Plains (1,000,000- km2) to evaluate how land use and management influence bird distribution and abundance. Regionally, habitat used by seven grassland...
thumbnail
Grassland ecosystems established under the conservation reserve program (CRP) in the Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) currently provide soil conservation and wildlife habitat services. We aimed to determine if these lands also sequester soil organic carbon (SOC), as compared with neighboring croplands across multiple farms in the North Dakota PPR. We sampled soil from small plots at 17 private farms in the central North Dakota PPR, where long-term (C15 years) grasslands managed under the CRP were paired with neighboring annual croplands. Cores were collected to 100 cm and split into 0–10, 10–20, 20–30, 30–40, 40–70, and 70–100 cm soil depth layers. We hypothesized the effect of land use on soil organic carbon (SOC),...
thumbnail
Proposal narrative and preliminary fact sheet for this project to improve the practice of prairie reconstruction by developing criteria by which success can be measured and related to reconstruction methodology. To accomplish this goal, the project will utilize past reconstruction efforts and records for two of the largest tallgrass prairie reconstructions in North America, Neal Smith National wildlife Refuge near Des Moines, Iowa and Glacial Ridge National Wildlife Refuge near Crookston, Minnesota. The extensive size, prolonged timeline, and records of seeding practices and site management that were kept for the reconstructions at these two refuges provide an ideal resource for evaluating which factors best predict...
thumbnail
Numerous studies have documented the effects of landscape disturbance, including that associated with energy development, on increased abundance of invasive and non-native species. As of February 2012, over 43,000 new petroleum wells have been drilled in the Williston Basin since the first successful Bakken test well drilled in 2000 in the Elm Coulee field of Montana. With the average single well pad approximating five acres, this large scale and regional land disturbance provides a pathway for the introduction and establishment of invasive species throughout the PPP LCC.The presence of invasive species has biological and economic implications across the PPP LCC. Leafy spurge has been shown to reduce habitat...
thumbnail
Conservation of biological communities requires accurate estimates of abundance for multiple species. Recent advances in estimating abundance of multiple species, such as Bayesian multispecies N-mixture models, account for multiple sources of variation, including detection error. However, false-positiveerrors (misidentification or double counts), which are prevalent in multispecies data sets, remain largely unaddressed. The dependent-double observer (DDO) method is an emerging method that both accounts for detection error and is suggested to reduce the occurrence of false positives because it relies on two observers working collaboratively to identify individuals. To date, the DDO method has not been combined with...
map background search result map search result map Grassland Bird Conservation on Working Landscapes: Spatial analysis linking populations to habitat Assessing land use practices on ecological charateristics of sagebrush ecosystems Interactions of Consolidation Drainage and Climate on Water-Level Dynamics, Wetland Productivity, and Waterbirds Developing a Framework for Evaluating Tallgrass Prairie Reconstruction Methods and Management Assessing the impacts to rural communities of wildlife habitat protection and restoration Carbon sequestration research to benefit grassland conservation in the northern Great Plains Rapid Assessment Method for Wildlife Issues at Potential Wind Power Sites Presence and abundance of invasive species and non-native perennial grasses related to energy development in Montana and North Dakota Comparison of removal-based methods for estimating abundance of five species of prairie songbirds A multispecies dependent double-observer model: A new method to for estimating multispecies abundance Assessing changes in Avian Communities Soil Organic Carbon Beneath Croplands and Re-established Grasslands in the North Dakota Prairie Pothole Region North Dakota Expired Conservation Reserve Program Soil Organic Carbon Assessment Final Report Fish Passage in Plains and Prairie Waterways report Report: Assessing and Implementing Ranch Management Planning at Scale through the Matador Ranch Grassbank Cows and Plows: Science-based Conservation for Grassland Songbirds in Agricultural Landscapes One step ahead of the plow: Using cropland conversion risk to guide Sprague's Pipit conservation in the northern Great Plains Framework for Evaluating Prairie Reconstruction Methods proposal and fact sheet Presence and abundance of non-native plant species associated with recent energy development in the Williston Basin Develop standardized, incremental, and sustainable monitoring strategy for habitat restoration activities Carbon sequestration research to benefit grassland conservation in the northern Great Plains Grassland Bird Conservation on Working Landscapes: Spatial analysis linking populations to habitat Report: Assessing and Implementing Ranch Management Planning at Scale through the Matador Ranch Grassbank Cows and Plows: Science-based Conservation for Grassland Songbirds in Agricultural Landscapes One step ahead of the plow: Using cropland conversion risk to guide Sprague's Pipit conservation in the northern Great Plains Presence and abundance of invasive species and non-native perennial grasses related to energy development in Montana and North Dakota Presence and abundance of non-native plant species associated with recent energy development in the Williston Basin Rapid Assessment Method for Wildlife Issues at Potential Wind Power Sites Developing a Framework for Evaluating Tallgrass Prairie Reconstruction Methods and Management Framework for Evaluating Prairie Reconstruction Methods proposal and fact sheet Assessing land use practices on ecological charateristics of sagebrush ecosystems Assessing the impacts to rural communities of wildlife habitat protection and restoration Comparison of removal-based methods for estimating abundance of five species of prairie songbirds A multispecies dependent double-observer model: A new method to for estimating multispecies abundance Assessing changes in Avian Communities Soil Organic Carbon Beneath Croplands and Re-established Grasslands in the North Dakota Prairie Pothole Region Fish Passage in Plains and Prairie Waterways report Develop standardized, incremental, and sustainable monitoring strategy for habitat restoration activities Interactions of Consolidation Drainage and Climate on Water-Level Dynamics, Wetland Productivity, and Waterbirds North Dakota Expired Conservation Reserve Program Soil Organic Carbon Assessment Final Report