Nebraska has a reputation as a flat, rural state. While the landscape near major population centers does little to combat this belief, two distinct and rich ecosystems compete to control the state's center.
Nestled within the Nebraska Sandhills is the Nebraska National Forest. This one-of-a-kind manufactured landscape was hand-planted in 1903 and is the largest manufactured forest in the United States at roughly 25,000 acres.
The Sandhills
At 50,000 km2, the semi-arid grasslands of the Nebraska Sandhills are the largest stabilized fragile sand dunes in the Western Hemisphere. These shifting sand dunes are covered in a thin layer of grasses, giving them a bronze-like hue. These grasslands are home to a variety of plant and animal life
The Sandhills also neighbor a critical water resource, the Ogallala Aquifer. This is partly due to the Sandhills' dunes' ability to absorb rainwater while allowing little runoff.
Early settlers thought Nebraska was an unproductive frontier. The lack of trees resulted in sweeping dust storms throughout the state, and there was also no easy access to lumber, meaning attempts at settlement would prove difficult.
The U.S. government is largely European-descended in its form, function, and composition. Joel Orth argues that representations of how nature should be in the United States and elsewhere tend to be derived from previous mistakes experienced in Europe. To be specific, Orth claims that, “George Perkins Marsh, an early critic of the destruction caused in Europe and Asia by human action, inspired a generation of American boosters and scientists to theorize that if earlier human civilizations negatively influenced nature through deforestation and poor agricultural methods, then ‘modern’ humans might improve it through afforestation.”
The motivations for an afforested Nebraska were more than just an idea to change the state's current landscape to better support settlement. Orth also found that Joseph Henry, the director of the Smithsonian Institute at the time, used previous lessons in Europe as information for environmental policy. To gain support for afforestation projects in “The Great American Desert,” he translated and published European studies linking tree growth with increased rainfall.
From there, mass tree-planting initiatives backed by the Federal Government would become inexorably linked with – while standing in stark opposition to – the sweeping hills and grasslands of the Great Plains.
J. Sterling Morton, a Nebraska City news editor turned secretary of the Nebraska Territory, was the original proponent of Arbor Day in 1872. At the time, he offered prizes to individuals and counties that planted the most trees on April 10.
Nebraska was officially the Arbor Day state, meaning grasslands had less room.
The Nebraska National Forest
Dr. Charles E. Bessey of UNL was the first person to suggest what would become the largest forestry project in the country. In 1890, he proposed the afforestation of the Sandhills to provide fuel and fence posts, control erosion, and provide homes for wildlife.
In 1981, the Federal Division of Forestry established a small pine plantation in Holt County. The experimental area was successful, and the federal government became interested in planting trees to stabilize the region for human settlement.
Terraforming the Great Plains, however, did not fully begin until 1902, when President Roosevelt created forest reserves on the Dismal Niobrara Rivers by executive proclamation.
These reserves became the Nebraska National Forest in 1908, and the Niobrara Reserve became the McKelvie National Forest in 1971. History Nebraska said planting began in 1903 and has totaled 25,000 acres planted in The Nebraska National Forest near Halsey and 3,000 planted in the McKelvie National Forest since.
Most of the seedlings planted in the forest came from the Charles E. Bessey Tree Nursery. The US Forest Service said they established the nursery to provide seedlings for the Nebraska National Forest. However, since 1926, the Nursery has also been producing seedlings for the Nebraska Conservation Trees Program, which distributes conservation trees to rural landowners in Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, and Kansas.
Ecological Issues
One primary concern for ecologists in managing these two distinct ecosystems comes from one of Nebraska’s native trees: the Eastern redcedar. These trees are highly competitive plants. In creating the forest with a mixture of Eastern redcedar and Ponderosa Pine, the cedars began to unexpectedly envelop the surrounding grasslands.
Eastern redcedar was found to encroach on grassland and forests at a rate of about 25,000 acres per year between 2010 and 2015.
Areas impacted by woody species invasion tend to experience shifts in ecosystems and the services they provide, including declines in species richness and diversity, reductions in net primary productivity and forage availability with subsequent impacts on livestock rearing communities, ecohydrological alterations leading to reduced soil water, shift in microbial communities and biogeochemical cycles, shift in fire regimes and the emergence of respiratory problems in humans in response to pollen. The tree has also been found to increase the risk of catastrophic wildfires with serious ecological, human, and economic losses.
Consequently, what used to be a small enough population to be curbed by natural wildfires has become an ecological quandary, and forest officials now need to find other ways to prevent encroachment—usually utilizing controlled burns. According to Nebraska Public Media, the Bessey Ranger District burns roughly 10,000 acres of grassland yearly to solve Eastern redcedar encroachment, or what they call “keeping the green glacier at bay.”
Wildfire
Suffering from drought, all it took was an overturned ATV to spark the most devastating wildfire in the forest’s history.
The Bovee Wildfire in October 2020 was not the first wildfire the forest has endured, but it was the worst. Estimations of the damage are that about 5,000 acres were scorched—or roughly 20% of the forest.
Officials eventually managed to control the blaze, but not before the 4-H camp and water tower were destroyed, as well as 14,000 acres of private ranchland.
Our research
Our research continues in the wake of The Bovee Wildfire. We aim to determine whether the area near Halsey will recover as forest or grassland.
By testing factors including the air, soil, vegetation, and water in the region at regular intervals, we can see the impact the wildfires have on this one-of-a-kind biome and how land managers can be mindful in helping the ecosystem recover, both by understanding what the area will naturally recover to as well as knowing which interventions will have the greatest likelihood of succeeding.
We are using Collaborative Adaptive Management to include and work with stakeholders and land managers to promote a better understanding of the ecological factors involved prior to decision-making.
Adaptive management is an approach to natural resource management that emphasizes management learning. It assumes that knowledge is incomplete and that what we think we know may be wrong.
Adaptive management has an explicit structure, including careful goal identification, clear objectives and hypotheses of causation, and data collection procedures followed by evaluation and reiteration.
Collaborative adaptive management (CAM) is a holistic approach to adaptive management that intentionally integrates stakeholders into the process. A key focus of CAM is the collective identification and uncertainty reduction through management experiments that enhance learning.
Engaging stakeholders, implementing change when appropriate, and informing the public are all important for new management approaches.
Using the data obtained in the objectives, we hope to develop adaptive land management strategies with stakeholders and relevant authorities and take the initiative to keep the public informed and engaged.
Hypotheses related to recovery post-fire will be developed with stakeholders, followed by establishing experiments and monitoring protocols.