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Anthony Joern>> Konza prairie is a world class research site and I don?t think a lot of people
realize that around here.
We?re celebrating our 40th year of Konza prairie. It?s set up as a very, very large experiment
where grazing and fire is manipulated for long-term periods.
Bison are one of the main drivers that determine what grasslands look like and how they function
and one of the things we?d like to do here at Konza prairie is understand more about
the decision they make in terms of where they spend time and how much they forage and where
they forage. So we have a herd that?s about 300 animals plus calves and so we?ve taken
some number of animals and put GPS collars on them so we can actually track exactly how
they?re using the site. So we end up getting a GPS reading for these 15 animals about every
30 minutes during the growing season.
Well, we started working on this about five years ago with some pilot work. The collars
are kind of expensive so we wanted to make sure it works. We were able to build up so
now we have enough collars that we get a pretty good sense of how bison are using this site.
The project itself is funded for minimally two more years and maybe three. Our hope though
is the information we?re obtaining from this is of sufficient value, we can turn this into
one of our long-term research projects out here. For us a long term research project
is 20 or 30 years.
In addition, because of their major impact on the grasslands, they?re having a big impact
on everything else and especially the plants and the insect communities. A big part of
our project actually is to also track how insects are responding to bison use and we?ve
picked areas where there?s a lot of bison use and areas where there?s less bison use
and we have un-grazed areas so we?re going to be comparing sort of insect responses and
see how they respond to bison.
We?ve also set up two fairly large scale experiments where we?re manipulating forage quality using
fertilizer to see if we can sort of direct how bison are selecting patches. We actually
set up patches of different size with the hopes that we can find what is the minimum
size patch that bison recognize.
Konza prairie is 40 years old and the Konza prairie long-term ecological research program
is 30 years old and it?s time for a celebration. We?ve invited grassland research scientists
from around the world and we?re setting up a symposium so that we will present what we?ve
learned at Konza over the last 30 or 40 years and then we?re going to ask researchers from
other parts of the world to take about the same ideas from their perspective working
in different places. The ultimate goal is a new synthesis for how to understand grasslands.