Prairie dogs (Cynomys spp.) have been eliminated from over 95% of their historic range in large part from direct eradication campaigns to reduce their purported competition with cattle for forage. Despite the longstanding importance of this issue to grassland management and conservation, the ecological interactions between cattle and prairie dogs have not been well examined. We address this iss...

Prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus) are used to study the aetiology and prevention of gallstones because of the similarities of prairie dog and human bile gallstone composition. Epidemiological and experimental studies have suggested a connection between infection with Helicobacter species and cholesterol cholelithiasis, cholecystis and gallbladder cancer. Ten of the 34 prairie dogs in this stu...

Powerline rights-of-way (ROWs) often provide habitat for early successional bird species that have suffered long-term population declines in eastern North America. To determine how the abundance of shrubland birds varies with habitat within ROW corridors and with land use patterns surrounding corridors, we ran Poisson regression models on data from 93 plots on ROWs and compared regression coeff...

Native bees are important ecologically and economically because their role as pollinators fulfills a vital ecosystem service. Pollinators are declining due to various factors, including habitat degradation and destruction. Grasslands, an important habitat for native bees, are particularly vulnerable. One highly imperiled and understudied grassland type in the United States is the Pacific Northw...

Native tallgrass prairie once dominated much of the midwestern United States, but this biome and the soil microbial diversity that once sustained this highly productive system have been almost completely eradicated by decades of agricultural practices. We reconstructed the soil microbial diversity that once existed in this biome by analyzing relict prairie soils and found that the biogeographic...

In the southern Great Plains, the greater prairie-chicken (Tympanuchus cupido) is confined to tallgrass prairie, a habitat now largely converted to agriculture. Remaining prairie is highly fragmented and subjected to land management practices that greatly alter the ecosystem of this species. Chief among these practices are deliberate, large-scale spring burns associated with early intensive sto...

Soil carbon sequestration is strongly affected by soil properties, climate, and anthropogenic activities. Assessing these drivers is key to understanding the effect of land use on soil organic matter stabilization. We evaluated land use and soil depth influencing patterns of soil organic matter stabilization in three types of soil profiles located under the same pedogenetic matrix and alpine co...

Control of the black-tailed prairie dog {Cynomys ludovicianus) is important for the reclamation of pasture ground for domestic cattle and limiting the spread of disease to humans and other wildlife. Six different concentrations of warfarin bait were fed to prairie dogs to determine mortality. Without the access to dietary vitamin K, the prairie dogs were susceptible to the warfarin bait. Howeve...

Oropharyngeal tularemia was identified as the cause of a die-off in captured wild prairie dogs at a commercial exotic animal facility in Texas. From this point source, Francisella tularensis-infected prairie dogs were traced to animals distributed to the Czech Republic and to a Texas pet shop. F. tularensis culture isolates were recovered tissue specimens from 63 prairie dogs, including one eac...

A field survey was begun in 1986 to determine the status of prairie vegetation on railroad rights-of-way in Wisconsin. Two % of 849 sample points located at 1.6 km intervals along railroads were found to contain relatively high quality prairie, and 23 % contained slightly degraded prairie. A significant proportion of these remnants contained mesic prairie, a community type which today is almost...