Crops to Prairie:
Step Aside
by Roger Martin
Grasses
rule what is left of natural Kansas.
They start off tall in the east,
where bluestem is king. Out west they grow stubby, with sideoats grama
and buffalo grass hunkering down against the wind.
In between is a mix.
If you can see a tree from your
window, be thankful.
The prairie that the settlers
viewed when they crossed the state in the early 19th century had been
swept clean of trees by lightning fires.
Such fires, as well as wet years
alternating with intense droughts, are the stuff of which prairies are
made.
In 1974, a University of Kansas
geographer named A.W. Kuchler produced the third vegetation map of Kansas
ever drawn. It was a map of how Kuchler imagined Kansas had looked 150
years before. He constructed it from masses of data about soil type,
climate, topographic features and other local conditions.
Early this year, a new vegetation-cover
map of the state, reflecting its contemporary condition, was published.
Among others, credit KU's Chris Lauver, Steve Egbert and Aimee Stewart,
affiliates of the Kansas Biological Survey, the Department of Geography
and the Kansas Applied Remote Sensing Program.
The new map is the product of
computers crunching satellite data into an image that shows about 40
kinds of land cover. It contains a level of detail that would have brought
tears of joy to Kuchler's eyes -- though the altered landscape it represents
might have brought a different kind of tears.
The KU researchers presented
a draft of their map alongside Kuchler's map at a professional meeting
in San Antonio, Texas, in late August.
They told those in attendance
that today, about 40 percent of Kansas lands are covered by natural
or near-natural vegetation. The other 60 percent of Kansas is put to
agricultural uses.
About 48 percent of that 60 percent
is cropland. The rest goes to non-native grasses like brome and to Conservation
Reserve Program sites.
Heavy grazing, destruction of
about half of the state's wetlands and intense logging in eastern Kansas
have disturbed the natural landscape, Lauver says. In the uplands, forest
and woods have expanded as we've learned how to put out fires.
Tallgrass prairie -- the kind
in the Flint Hills -- covered about 27 percent of the state on Kuchler's
map; on the new map it occupies about 12 percent. In southeast Kansas,
a lot of cross timbers forest has been lost.
In western Kansas, sand prairie,
alkali sacaton mixed prairie and salt marsh have been severely reduced
from their original size, Lauver says.
KU is a partner with Kansas State
University on this project. KSU is producing Kansas wildlife habitat
maps and land-ownership maps.
When all the maps, which are digitally stored, are
overlaid on each other, Lauver says, you'll be able to see where there
is great plant and animal diversity and whether that diversity is in
any way protected.
The result will be what Lauver,
who doesn't want to rile anybody up, calls "conservation opportunities."
Kuchler -- a man so taken with
Kansas' geographic past that he produced a map that was 150 years out
of date when it was still hot off the presses -- would, no doubt, approve.
