Members of the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Easement team collected data during a wetland field day. On July 17, 2024, the team members from Kansas State Office to the traveled to a McPherson Valley Wetlands easement to evaluate a potentially more effective method of assessing closed and restored wetlands easements.

The Agricultural Conservation Easement Program (ACEP) helps landowners, land trusts, and other entities protect, restore, and enhance wetlands or protect working farms and ranches through conservation easements.

“Each year we monitor easements for compliance to make sure they are not in violation of the Warranty Easement Deed, including making sure there is no equipment on the easement, and nobody is developing the easement in any way,” Matt Carey, an easement specialist on the acquisition team said. “Other than the initial establishment, we have never really taken a systematic approach to looking at the vegetative establishment to see how well it is doing over time. We went out to one of our Wetland Reserve Program easements in McPherson County to do a proof of concept for some vegetative monitoring to help bolster our compliance monitoring and to make sure that we are doing what we can to restore these areas to historical wetland conditions.”

Wetland areas once degraded from agricultural use can be protected, restored and enhanced through Wetlands Reserve Easements (WRE). Megan Lambert, the easement program manager for stewardship, said the McPherson Valley Wetland easement was initially put under easement in 2000 and is now owned by the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks. Lambert said the wetland had an appropriate level of vegetative diversity and that the easement team seeks to put a greater emphasis on ecological monitoring and their documentation of current vegetation in a way that can be easily replicated by area easement specialists in other parts of the state.

“Vegetative wise it looked great, we found a lot of grass species we like to see present in a mid-to-tall grass prairie. We found Big bluestem, Indiangrass, Switchgrass, Sideoats grama and Little bluestem,” Lambert said. “In our most diverse plot, we found about 15 different species of grasses and forbs. That is pretty good diversity for a restored site.”

Tyler Rafter, the Kansas State Coordinator for Pheasants Forever and Quail Forever, said the vegetative cover on the easement site was highly biodiverse and provided a great example of suitable habitat for upland birds.

“It was rich with flowering plants as well as numerous cool season and warm season perennial bunch grasses which create canopy cover and open ground space crucial for young broods to travel,” Rafter said. “It was more than adequate for Northern bobwhite quail and several bobwhite quail were indeed heard, including one sighting.”
Rafter also made mention that the team used a device called a Robel Pole in their analysis of the vegetation present.

“We mostly used a Robel Pole to study both species height and species richness in an effort to get a little bit more science based on how we do the survey work across easements,” Rafter said.

According to the USDA Forest Service Robel Pole Field Guide, the Robel Pole method uses a pole with alternating white and gray bands to simply and reliably take visual height obstruction readings of vegetation structure and standing biomass
“We identified what species were within a 4-meter radius around the Robel Pole to establish species richness,” Carey said. “We considered the species of grass, forbs or trees, or any kind of other shrubby vegetation and if any wildlife species was detected on site.”

In addition to the ecological diversity observed by Rafter and the easement team, Lambert said they also documented some undesirable vegetation at the site.

“When we have woody encroachment from species such as Eastern red cedars or Siberian elm or locusts, we want to measure these as well,” Lambert said. “One of the goals with a more robust ecological monitoring protocol is to help determine what management is needed to properly steward our easements. It also starts the conversation with the landowner about what Compatible Use Authorizations (CUA) they could use to help maintain the easement. Assessing the size and density of the woody species also gives us an idea of the best management tools for a particular site. For example, we saw some small Eastern red cedars encroaching, so a prescribed burn would likely be our recommended management tool.”

Carey stated that he ultimately hopes the easements team will garner better knowledge of how the restorative practices used in the McPherson Valley Wetlands were effective and how they can be eventually implemented in the restoration of other Kansas easements.

“Sometimes, we look at areas easement by easement, and even if it is just a couple miles down the road, we might do something just a little bit different to help that site-specific restoration,” Carey said. “However, just keeping track of that information will help us better determine how we are going to go about restoring future easements in similar areas.”

For more information about Wetland Reserve Easements (WRE) the USDA’s Agricultural Conservation Easement Program, visit https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/programs-initiatives/wre-wetland-reserve-ease….
 

To learn more about NRCS programs, producers can contact their local USDA Service Center. Producers can also apply for NRCS programs, manage conservation plans and contracts, and view and print conservation maps by logging into their farmers.gov account. If you do not have an account, sign up today.

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