Grasslands once spanned across Nebraska in waves, from the tallgrass prairies in the east to the shortgrass prairie in the west and all the mixed-grass prairies in between. The history of Nebraska’s grasslands are deeply intertwined with the history of its people. Indigenous peoples across the Great Plains possess diverse and intimate knowledge about the […]

It’s 4 a.m. and Forsberg and I are on the road to the Crane Trust south of Wood River, Nebraska. I’ve visited the Crane Trust twice before this morning: once for a brief school-sanctioned plunge into the Platte River with my classmates sophomore year, and again a few months ago to watch Sandhill Cranes migrating […]

Just to the north of my hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, is a patch of undisturbed tallgrass prairie, one of the largest of the few remaining remnants of an ecosystem that once covered the eastern reaches of the Platte River Basin. Since 1983 this 230-acre tract has been owned by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, but university […]