ON THE GROUND
Battling for Biodiversity The Nature Conservancy’s new Habitat Strike Teams go to work
habitat needs help. Natural allies of the grasslands, such as bison and elk, were driven from the land by European settlement and federal policies that sought to displace Indigenous tribes. The cascading effects of losing key pieces of the ecosystem have left an opening for invaders. “One of the reasons we have to fight these shrubs so hard is there are no more elk and no more bison,” Tanner says. “We’re just sort of a proxy.” Tanner is part of The Nature Conservancy’s strategy to use newly created Habitat Strike Teams in Missouri to combat invasive species and promote biodiversity. Three mobile teams have been staged in priority geographies: Western Ozarks, Eastern Ozarks and the Osage Plains.
If you were to observe Wah’Kon-Tah Prairie from the air, you would see a struggle for the landscape’s future playing out as a battle of colors. The wildflowers’ lavenders, whites and yellows dot a front of native grasses, which grade from pale green to gold in the heat of midsummer. Together, they fight to hold ground against creeping, monochromatic green islands of unwanted shrubs and trees—sumacs, persimmons, cherries and oaks—that threaten to turn this open expanse of western Missouri plains into scrubby forests, thick with brush, through a process called succession. “The No. 1 reason to stop that process is biodiversity,” says Isaiah Tanner, The Nature Conservancy’s Osage Plains fire and stewardship coordinator in Missouri. “That’s mission No. 1.”
There are more than 300 species of plants at Wah’Kon-Tah, not to mention all the wildlife that depends on them. That kind of variety used to be the norm when wild spaces covered the land. Now, it is rare. Less than 4% of the world’s tallgrass prairie remains, making it one of Earth’s most endangered ecosystems. And it’s not just prairies that are in trouble. Ecosystems around the globe are struggling amid twin crises of a changing climate and rapid decline of biodiversity. More than a million species could face the threat of extinction in the coming years, and habitats are disappearing at alarming rates. Wah’Kon-Tah stands out in that context as a jewel of biodiversity. The land within its boundaries is protected from threats such as development, and it will stay that way. Even so, the
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THIS PAGE Isaiah Tanner is the leader of one of The Nature Conservancy’s new Habitat Strike Teams. © Doyle Murphy/TNC
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