North America’s Central Grasslands are among the most endangered ecosystems in the world. They face a suite of conservation challenges associated with habitat loss, transformation, and fragmentation. Millions of bison, pronghorn, and elk historically inhabited the Central Grasslands, along with wolves and grizzly bears, once rivaling Africa’s Serengeti, but the region has since been converted to a highly domesticated landscape, with fences, livestock, crops, and complex jurisdictional boundaries making large-scale conservation efforts and planning challenging. The impact of human activities on the Central Grasslands has resulted in widespread declines in native wildlife, including >95 percent (%) declines in bison and prairie dogs, >50% decline in grassland birds, and near extirpation of wolves and grizzly bears.

Dr. Ana Davidson, a research scientist at Colorado State University's (CSU) Colorado Natural Heritage Program (CNHP), is recognized nationally and internationally for her work on burrowing mammals, grassland ecology, and global mammal ecology. With a joint faculty position in the Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology at CSU since 2018, Davidson combines her studies of ecological process and species interactions with urgent conservation needs, interacting with global climate change. She states, “Because grasslands are the primary habitat used for agriculture and livestock production, they have been transformed across the globe and are often consequently rife with human-wildlife conflict, further stressed by a warming climate.” As a new consortium member with the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NC CASC), co-principal investigator Davidson will provide the primary expertise on wildlife science and zoonotic diseases, with a focus on the North Central grasslands and keystone species such as prairie dogs and bison. In addition to engaging students from CSU in her research program, she will be participating, along with her team of CNHP conservation planners and spatial analysts, in the upcoming revision of Colorado’s State Wildlife Action Plan (SWAP), while also contributing data and expertise to other states in the North Central region.

Recent awareness of the plight of the Central Grasslands and associated species has inspired new conservation initiatives like the Central Grasslands Roadmap, the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies’ (WAFWA) Western Grasslands Initiative, and The North American Grasslands Conservation Act of 2024 recently introduced in the U.S. Senate. One of the conservation strategies of these and other initiatives is to focus prioritization efforts on umbrella species, whose conservation results in protecting suites of associated species or entire ecosystems. Black-tailed prairie dogs (BTPDs) and bison are often at the center of many conservation efforts throughout the Central Grasslands because of the keystone roles they play. Yet, populations of both BTPDs and bison have declined dramatically (>95%) since European settlement, and their recovery is fraught with challenges. 

The declines of prairie dogs range-wide, and locally following cyclic plague events, have resulted in cascading declines in associated species. The black-footed ferret, for example, relies on prairie dogs for over 95% of their diet and is considered North America’s most endangered mammal, largely as a result of the dramatic decline in their primary prey. These declines in prairie dogs and associated species underscore the need for conserving the prairie dog ecosystem by identifying potential landscapes for conservation, both now and into the future. And–critically–such areas need to be considered within the context of the social, environmental, and economic factors that influence where prairie dog complexes can be conserved and expanded across large blocks of continuous habitat so that they can support numerous grassland species.

Stay tuned for a new publication by Davidson and colleagues that identifies potential landscapes for the conservation of black-tailed prairie dogs, incorporating ecological, political and social factors, along with changing climate and land use to maximize long-term conservation potential. Meanwhile, the authors have an interactive online map publicly available for conservation planning here and a project page here.