The nature conservancy's prairie wings project: a conservation strategy for the grassland birds of the Western Great plains
This article is part of a larger document. View the larger document here.Abstract
In the second half of the nineteenth century, driven by the cultural mandate of manifest destiny and economic expansion, the North American west was rapidly settled and permanently altered by hundreds of thousands of residents from the eastern United States, Canada, Central Mexico and Europe. The first region to fill up with new arrivals was the Great Plains, a “sea of grass” that stretched uninterruptedly, from the prairies of southern Canada across the middle of the United States, to the arid grasslands of Northern Mexico – an area of both stunning continuity and biological complexity that is the largest biome on the continent. Although it is widely accepted that native peoples purposefully altered the prairie landscape primarily through the use of fire, in the last 150 years conversion to agriculture, fragmentation from urban development, degradation of wetlands, groundwater depletion, fire suppression, and incompatible grazing practices have been and will be among the most serious threats to prairies and many of the grassland obligate bird species that rely on the varied habitat types of the plains.