Kansas Bio Survey & Center for Ecological Research

Can a recover after a cedar invasion? You’ve seen these trees lining the roadsides and smothering former meadows and pastures.

🐦 Eastern redcedars (Juniperus virginiana) have long been used as windbreaks and serve as an important food source for wild birds (which spread the seeds).

🌑 But they can overtake open ground quickly, and redcedar invasion can be particularly damaging to native prairies because the tree’s wide base and thick foliage quickly shade out native grasses and wildflowers.

🌱 Falling needles also change soil pH, making it more alkaline. This binds soil nutrients such as phosphorus, depleting resources for other plants.

🌳 Once established, redcedar can remain a dominant species for decades before being gradually replaced by hardwoods such as oaks and hickories.

☀️ Once we clear a never-plowed prairie of redcedars, what steps should we take to help it recover—and what should we reasonably expect in terms of recovery?

We'll have some answers in the near future. Holly Andres, graduate student in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, is in the beginning stages of research on these very questions. She’s been awarded a fellowship from the Grassland Heritage Foundation for her planned work. More to come.

Holly's advisor is Ben Sikes, a senior scientist here at the Kansas Biological Survey and a KU professor.

Can maintain high yields with half the nitrogen fertilizer routinely used?

🌽 KU researchers are working on that goal with collaborators at Colorado State University. Agricultural changes happen in stages.

🌽 Maggie Wagner, Kansas Biological Survey associate scientist and KU associate professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, along with Joel Swift, postdoc in Maggie’s lab, and Kai Sarwinski, undergraduate researcher, have been in Fort Collins, Colo., working with their colleagues.

🌽 The researchers collected samples and data from hundreds of maize (corn) plants, with the goal of identifying the genetic codes of those that perform better than expected when grown without fertilizer.

🌽 They're especially interested in the roles of roots and root-associated microbes, which requires uprooting the plants.

🌽 The overall goal of the project is to breed maize hybrids that maintain high yield when receiving only 50 percent of the standard dose of nitrogen fertilizer. The project is funded by the Dept. of Energy.

We had a wet spring in eastern Kansas this year; other areas were wildly variable. Are precipitation extremes changing?

💧 A new interactive map allows users to explore data and patterns in across the state. (Link in comments)

🌧️ It's based on rainfall records from 1895 through 2023 and looks specifically at annual and seasonal extremes.

💦 Data shows an increase in recurring wet extremes since about 1980.

You can search for and download historical data by:
👉 Groundwater Management District;
👉 county;
👉 reservoir catchment basin; and
👉 Regional Advisory Committee (Kansas Water Office = funded the research).

The Kansas Hydroclimate Extremes app was developed by David Weiss and Jude Kastens of our Kansas Applied Remote Sensing Program. It’s based on study led by Sam Zipper of the Kansas Geological Survey; collaborators were David, Jude and KU faculty members from the departments of geography and atmospheric science and geology.

Your monthly check-in for July at the West Campus Pocket Prairie, a teaching space planted by our researchers and maintained with help from the KU grounds crew. There's a lot of noise from machinery here, but this small restoration and the creatures in it seem to be thriving. 🦋🌻🌼

Who tracks the plant and animal species in Kansas? We do. Our Kansas Natural Heritage Inventory represents the state of Kansas in the NatureServe network.

(BTW: Who will be the first to share, in the comments, the Latin name of the moth in our photo?)

NatureServe is made up of natural heritage programs and data centers throughout the Western Hemisphere. The network was begun by The Nature Conservancy in 1974 and transferred to NatureServe in 1994.

🌿 Our research center’s Heritage program collects information on the state’s biological features, emphasizing those that are sensitive, threatened or endangered. The program maintains a core database of (plants, animals and ecological communities) for Kansas.

🦋 Our database contains more than 10,000 records. Staff members are constantly evaluating the lists of rare species, removing those that we learn are more common than previously thought, and adding whole groups, mostly insects, for which there is little information.

🦇 Data on these “elements of biodiversity” are gathered from a variety of sources and entered into NatureServe’s Biotics 5 interface for data entry and mapping.

🦡 Heritage program staff work closely with public and private decision-makers to provide early notification of potential resource conflicts, to guide land use decisions and to develop conservation priorities.

🦉 Have you visited the NatureServe website (link in comments)? You’ll find us there in the network directory.

Did you know? Our researchers maintain a collection of living that improve both native ecosystems and crop production. It’s the largest collection of its kind in the world, an international resource for research, and it requires constant care. But funding for its maintenance is uncertain.

A challenge gift of $24,000 in support of the collection has been set up and will be released after 50 donors have made gifts.

Those gifts can be any size. Like $5.

More about the International Collection of Vesicular Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi (INVAM):
🍄‍🟫 Stories about it have been published in The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine and Sierra Magazine.
🍄‍🟫 It’s been maintained for more than 40 years.
🍄‍🟫 It’s a key resource for scientists, educators and researchers who study plant health, agriculture, ecology and climate resilience.
🍄‍🟫 Researchers from around the world rely on the collection, request samples from it and draw upon INVAM’s species descriptions, cultivation methods and guidance to support their work.

If you’d like to provide support, any amount, please click the link in the comments below. And please share.

If you use a mapping app to, say, find a restaurant, you use GIS. Ecologists, land managers, emergency managers and others use GIS to manage natural resources, monitor environmental risks (like flooding), identify areas for land protection and more.

But there’s a lot of data. And it's not organized.

The world’s digital data is like a huge library with no index, and books of every topic scattered in piles. Mike Houts, associate researcher here, has developed a tool that helps. The Nested Hexagon Framework, a four-year project funded by the Information Network of Kansas, integrates local and national datasets on topics like wildlife observations, landscape characteristics, energy resources and climate data.

Here are some recent application of the Framework:

🌎 international collaboration on whooping crane migration corridors;
🌾 a 13-state effort to identify priority grassland areas;
💡identification of low-impact areas for energy development (like interstate highway corridors).

This interactive, open-source tool will make data more discoverable, save time and support careful decision-making. More on the project page on our Kansas Applied Remote Sensing website: https://kars-geoplatform-ku.hub.arcgis.com/pages/nhf-lsdb

Did you know? Our research center has a real economic impact in Kansas.* Based on FY25 data, employment here contributes:

🌿 192 jobs;
💧 $4.7M in labor income;
🍄‍🟫 $5.5M in value added to the Kansas economy.

Seriously.

This results in $1.2M in tax revenue, including nearly $250K in revenue for the state. (Using IMPLAN model, https://implan.com/

Debbie Baker, aquatic ecologist here, is interviewed in this story about a 10-year USGS study on pesticides in rivers.

Pesticide pollution in Midwest and Great Plains rivers is getting worse, decade-long study reveals Pesticide pollution is a problem especially in the middle of the country. And sometimes there's enough of it to possibly hurt aquatic plants and animals.

We love partnering with Friends of the Kaw - Kansas Riverkeeper on projects that benefit our communities. We've posted a direct image of the Lawrence watersheds map in the comments below.