Restoration at Dunn Ranch Prairie More than 20 years of The Nature Conservancy’s work come together at Dunn Ranch Prairie—a vibrant display of one of Missouri’s iconic native landscapes. The tallgrass prairie brims with hundreds of species of plants and animals in Harrison County, near the Iowa border. Greater prairie-chickens perform their unmistakable "booming" every spring, upland sandpipers’ ghostly calls carry in the wind, regal fritillary butterflies alight on gorgeous coneflowers and bison roam across rolling hills. Grasslands are important not only for native species but also for people. They clean our water, protect us from flooding and store carbon in their roots.
Bison at Dunn Ranch Prairie © Doyle Murphy/TNC
Originally 2,281 acres, the site included 1,000 acres untouched by plow when TNC bought it in 1999 from descendants of the Dunn family. We’ve carefully restored the prairie surrounding that core habitat while knitting together additional properties, creating an expanse of 3,258 acres of tallgrass. People from all over the world come to experience the grasslands here. The addition in 2017 of an adjacent TNC site, Little Creek Farm, with housing for visiting researchers further enhances Dunn Ranch’s power to promote conservation beyond its bounds. In 2021, Dunn Ranch became TNC’s first Center of Conservation Innovation in Missouri, our growing network of research hubs.
Fish Passage at Little Creek Farm Flowing from its headwaters on The Nature
Conservancy’s Dunn Ranch Prairie, Little Creek is one of the last places where you can find a tiny minnow called the Topeka Shiner. The Great Plains native was once plentiful in prairie streams, but the degradation of its habitat landed the shiner on the endangered species list in 1998. Erosion fills in the pools where shiners ride out inhospitable temperatures, and manmade barriers cut them off from food and mating grounds. But the damage is reversible. In the spring of 2022, construction crews rebuilt Little Creek where it passes from Dunn Ranch through TNC’s Little Creek Farm in Harrison County. The project replaced erosion-carved banks with gentle slopes, assembled from layers of stones, earth and tangled tree roots. Freshly planted native grasses, shrubs and trees guard against future erosion and filter water running into the channel. Workers even built an underwater wedge at the lip of a culvert. Where water once plunged 6 feet off the edge, the stream flows at one level. The change reconnected five miles of aquatic habitat for the shiner and offers a scalable model landowners can use to fight erosion and protect their properties.
Before and after: restoration of Little Creek © Steve Herrington/TNC
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