Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: California
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center (NPWRC) is engaged in an on-going research effort to better understand grassland, wetland and riverine ecosystems and their associated biotic communities in the northern Great Plains (NGP). NPWRC's research programs specifically focus on identifying and understanding threats to NGP ecosystems and developing and evaluating conservation measures that abate those threats. Examples of threats of current concern are climate change, invasive plant and animal species, runoff of chemicals and sediments, and landscape modification to support agriculture, and habitat fragmentation. Moreover, many threats to ecosystems and populations can interact; for example there is concern that landscape modifications, climate change, and invasive species have interacting effects upon ecosystem health and services. The proposed effort will allow collaboration with NPWRC to expand research efforts in these diverse prairie ecosystems.