Jill Shaffer (Former Employee)

Since the mid-1960s, populations of grassland birds have been declining more precipitously than any other group of birds in North America. These long-term declines highlight the need to better understand the habitat requirements of grassland birds and how management practices affect individual species and their habitats. Although resource managers have long recognized that every...

Biodiversity offsetting, or compensatory mitigation, is increasingly being used in temperate grassland ecosystems to compensate for unavoidable environmental damage from anthropogenic developments such as transportation infrastructure, urbanization, and energy development. Pursuit of energy independence in the United States will expand domestic energy production. Concurrent with this...

No abstract available.

Birds are essential components of most ecosystems and provide many services valued by society. However, many populations have undergone striking declines as their habitats have been lost or degraded by human activities. Terrestrial grasslands are vital habitat for birds in the North American Prairie Pothole Region (PPR), but grassland conversion and fragmentation from agriculture and...

The key to Horned Lark (Eremophila alpestris) management is maintaining areas with short, sparse vegetation by burning, mowing, or grazing. Horned Larks have been reported to use habitats with less than or equal to (≤) 70 centimeters (cm) average vegetation height, 3–26 cm visual obstruction reading, 15–67 percent grass cover, 3–70 percent forb cover, ≤21 percent shrub cover, 1–44...

Wetlands provide a wide variety of ecosystem services including water quality remediation, biodiversity refugia, groundwater recharge, and floodwater storage. Realistic estimation of ecosystem service benefits associated with wetlands requires reasonable simulation of the hydrology of each site and realistic simulation of the upland and wetland plant growth cycles. Objectives of this...