Landscape-Level Long-Term Biological Research and Monitoring Plan for the Crane Trust

About this book

Implementing a long-term monitoring program will help to more critically assess the impacts of management actions and to better understand their impacts on Whooping Cranes, Sandhill Cranes, and the other bird species that pass through and breed in the Big Bend region of the Platte River in Nebraska. The Crane Trust considers it its responsibility to publish, in scientific journals and management publications, the results of its research so that it may inform its colleagues in the conservation community and maintain a public record of its research program. A better understanding is needed of dynamic ecological change in the long view by implementing an achievable, straightforward research and monitoring strategy on the Crane Trust’s properties. The Trust has an opportunity to collect ecological information on an important mosaic of wet meadows, river channels, sloughs, woodlands, and tallgrass prairies, across a diversity of soil types and biotic communities, under a variety of management regimes. A large amount of research has been done at the Platte River Whooping Crane Maintenance Trust over the last 40 years. One way in which it can continue this legacy is via the continued implementation of its long-term research and monitoring efforts, allowing it to be a cooperator in the great task of understanding the “long-scale” ecological changes taking place in the Great Plains, and in our world. This is the future trend of ecological science and land management; we are moving from shorter-term experiments to long-term data collection as a standard practice for understanding the ecological systems we inhabit.

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