On Saturday, June 29th, the Southern Plains Land Trust (SPLT, “split”) will host an event called “Toast to the Prairie.”

The event will allow supporters of SPLT’s mission to mingle and network and hear about upcoming plans for SPLT’s future, which, if their progress since 1998 is any indication (60,000+ acres of Central Shortgrass Prairie preserved), will be no less than impressive.

Grasslands are the most threatened and least protected biome in the world. Daily threats include: endless residential, commercial, and industrial development, the ubiquitous plow, silly tree planting campaigns, and an increasingly warmer, drier, and carbon-rich environment; which promotes woody plant invasion and dominance in grasslands, degrading grasslands into woodlands, which exacerbates landscape warming, contributing to an endless feedback loop of system-wide degradation. With those threats comes endangerment and extinction for some grassland wildlife species.

SPLT’s work is helping to guard against those threats by buying grassland parcels strategically using a “defend the core and grow the core” mentality, and removing interior fences to allow prairie wildlife such as Pronghorn antelope and bison to roam freely, and for grassland birds to fly and nest and mate without added predatory pressure aided by fenceposts. The result is not only landscape-scale grassland conservation, but a broader ecosystem preserve for the grassland systems to function as they should, and for the widlife dependent on those functions to live, without the impediments of landscape fragmentation and disruptive human inputs.

For example, many streams and creeks on SPLT lands are perennial or nearly so. SPLT staff let the water and its quintessential engineers, the beaver, do the work. It’s “free labor,” as Preserve Manager Jay Tutchton, Esq. notes, and letting those processes do what they do improves landscape function. Additionally, these large, intact parcels are also a refuge for the last of the intact shortgrass prairie and their longtime inhabitants. One of SPLT’s preserves is also a re-introduction site for the endangered black-footed ferret, a species dependent on prairie dogs and their towns.

A graphic produced by SPLT depicting their conservation achievements within the SPLT network.