Reintroducing Bison Restores the Great Plains Ecosystem :: Environment Animals Nature Ecology Essays

Reintroducing Bison Restores the gigantic Plains EcosystemGreat Plains historyThe Great Plains house a familiar story of overexploitation and the emergence of the need to tack the damage. Today rural beas are showing the decline of traditional factory farm and extractive land uses that have left the area barren and unproductive. Restoration projects, in particular those involving the reintroduction of the bison, give an example of bringing the native ecosystem of an area sanction to life.Grasslands once covered 40% of our nation, the bison once ranged over 48 of our states. Pre-settlement bison commonwealth estimates range from 30 to 70 million, after the extensive overexploitation of these animals their numbers pool dwindled to less than two dozen (Walters, 1996). The grasslands were a highly productive ecosystem thus far when the bison numbered in the millions because the two coevolved with each other adapting to conditions as well as each other. Todays cattle from the old world have replaced the bisons place in the plains degrading them while collecting the majority of the grains produced by American agriculture. attached the natural intact environment, bison thrive on their own without outside help. They are adapted to the harsh plains, burned into the genes of bison is the speed and agility needed to run a prairie fire or track the greenup path of a summertime thunderstorm. This is an animal shaped by millennia of natural selective pressures in the Great Plains environment, Fox and biologist Craig Knowles wrote (Defenders).The Great Plains have suffered cycles of booms and displumes since its early white settlement. The showtime began in 1862 with the Homestead Act. The Act gave pioneer families 160 acres of warrant federal land to be farmed for five years. This was the start of federally subsidise settlement that caused soil erosion and the lowering of the water table at long last leading to heavy depopulation. The next cycle began in the early 1900s with brand-new homestead laws and larger free land incentives. This second cycle finish with the Great Depression, drought, the Dust Bowl, the abolition of homesteading, and was illustrated to us in John Steinbecks Grapes of Wrath. The thirdly cycle beginning in the 1940s reached its peak in the mid-seventies when the Department of Agriculture encouraged fence-post to fence-post cultivation. By the mid 1980s the bust phase set in and is still continuing (Popper, 1994). The Buffalo ballparkThe Buffalo Commons is a phrase that was coined by Deborah E.