The Great Plains face a surprising threat: Too many trees

Across the Great Plains, encroaching trees, mostly eastern red cedar, are spreading into grassland once kept open by fire and grazing, a phenomenon ecologists call woody encroachment or the green glacier. Texas A&M AgriLife estimates it costs the ten Great Plains states $4 billion in lost range production, while ecologists warn of biodiversity losses affecting birds, insects and small mammals that depend on open prairie.

The spread traces partly to a century of fire suppression and a deep-rooted culture of deliberate tree-planting, dating to the Homestead Act and Nebraska's Kinkaid Act, which required settlers to cultivate land with crops or trees to claim ownership. Rancher Shelly Kelly, who heads the Sandhills Task Force, is now trying to reverse that cultural instinct, distributing water bottles that read “Be A Leader, Cut a Cedar.”

Regions with a living culture of prescribed burns, like the Flint Hills of Kansas, have preserved two-thirds of the nation's remaining tallgrass prairie, while areas like the Nebraska Sandhills lack that tradition and are now trying to build it from scratch. Conservationists note the irony that grasslands can be a more stable carbon sink than forests, since woody plants release their stored carbon all at once when they inevitably burn.

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