On the night of September 1, 2018, I was in downtown Lincoln, enthusiastically waiting to watch the first Cornhusker football game of the Scott Frost era. Right around kickoff, a large thunderstorm moved into Lincoln and lingered. After a nearly three hour delay, the game was canceled, a first since 1943. The rain continued for […]

The Platte Basin is located in the heart of the United States of America, encompassing a broad diversity of landscapes and habitats. From the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado to the Great Plains of Nebraska, this watershed, waters cities, small farming communities, and provides habitat for wildlife. The Platte Basin is made up of five […]

While meeting with the Platte Basin Timelapse (PBT) team for the first time last fall, I realized the magnitude of their efforts to catalog the movement of water, temporal change in various habitats, and diverse organisms that reside in the Platte River Basin. Little did I know that this meeting would significantly affect my future […]

It’s a foggy October morning at The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, located in south central Nebraska.  I’m struggling to keep up with Mike Schrad as he treks through tall, shirt-soaking grasses in search of the Sherman live traps he placed the night before. Schrad picks up the first four of these small, aluminum boxes […]

Many early bridge builders constructed embankments out into the Platte River, shortening the total length of the bridge and reducing construction costs and labor. The constrained banks make the river more narrow, creating faster currents and deeper channels.

Last week I ventured out to the Central Platte with Mikes-squared (that’s both Mike Forsberg and Mike Farrell) and a film crew. What started out as a pretty normal 15 degree day ended with a peculiar appearance of an orange buoy, dancing in a field, and Forsberg sprawled out in a drainage pipe. To further […]

Like all good things, it began with a flowchart. Years ago, when we were starting the time-lapse project, we manually downloaded images at each camera site. It was sufficient. We got to see every image, got to visit each site, and tangibly worked with the project’s profit; we’d return from the field with handfuls of […]

With one hand on the wheel, Michael Forsberg uses the other to absent-mindedly thumb through four empty memory cards on the center console. We’re driving up into the Nebraska Sandhills to change out cards at four of our time-lapse camera systems there, a trip he takes every three months or so. Though we’ve converted many […]