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News And Notes - Volume 3, Number 1

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Contents:

Call for Papers

Conferences

Review Of Battle Against Extinction: Native Fish Management In The American West By W. L. Minckley And James E. Deacon, John D. Lynch

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

If you enjoy the West or are interested in or angry about conservationists and conservation biology, this book is a must. The book consists of the papers presented at a conference celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the Desert Fishes Council and emphasizes fish conservation in the Colorado River and desert southwest. Before water development (and even now) the West was dry and the image of fishes living in the desert an impossible one. Nevertheless, across the spread of the West, one finds canyon-bound rivers, isolated lakes (some with interesting chemistries), wet meadows, and spring heads. In these …

Review Of To Reclaim A Divided West: Water, Law, And Public Policy, 1848-1902 By Donald J. Pisani, Mark A. Eifler

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Writers of western history often assume that the West is a unified region, and thus impose a regional story on what is in fact a dynamically diverse area. Donald Pisani's study carefully avoids this pitfall. Viewing the West as a "fragmented" region, divided by geographic variety, economic competition, and local and state political jealousies, he underscores the region's numerous and very real divisions. His study, which is a thoroughly documented work of major importance in the field of water policy history, thus transcends his particular topic and offers an important insight into western history in general.

Review Of Wilderness Issues In The Arid Lands Of The Western United States By Samuel I. Zeveloff And Cyrus M. Mckell, Thomas R. Dunlap

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

This is a set of papers on the problems of establishing and managing Western arid land wilderness. All are sensible, and together they provide a judicious and reasonably complete introduction to this specialized area of land management. The book begins with the editors' introduction, followed by Utah Congressman Wayne Owens' discussion of Utah's arid lands and their value as wilderness. This, a pleasant surprise, rises above the usual level of Congressional commentary for constituents. Three case studies follow. One concerns raptor preservation on the Snake River, another the conflicting interests of bighorn sheep and horses, the third fish preservation in …

Review Of Gunfighter Nation: The Myth Of The Frontier In Twentieth-Century America By Richard Slotkin, Eric H. Monkkonen

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

This book has 660 pages of text, 102 of notes, plus a very long Bibliography and thorough index. This reviewer has read everything but the Index and some of the Bibliography. I can report that except for avid fans of Slotkin or of the genres on which he chooses to report, this is far more reading than is needed to get his principalidea. It is: a Myth (his caps) about the frontier-the violent conquest of indigenous people and landscape-has been the well spring of American national identity. The truth of this is not relevant to his book: he labors to …

Is The Distribution Of Sandhill Cranes On The Platte River Changing?, Craig A. Faanes, Michael J. Levalley

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Data collected during 1957-1989 on the Platte and North Platte rivers was analyzed to detect changes in the temporal and spacial distribution of staging sandhill cranes. The data indicate that a significant west-to-east shift in crane distribution has developed since the late 1960s. The most negative changes have occurred between Lexington and Kearney, Nebraska, where vegetation encroachment has been most pronounced. A significant increase in crane numbers between the Wood River and Highway 34 bridges is attributed to the result of vegetation scouring flows and active removal of woody vegetation.

Review Of The Land That Feeds Us By John Fraser Hart, Brad Bays

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

John Fraser Hart knows farming. His near half-century of scholarship on U.S. agricultural regions is extended to the general reader in The Land That Feeds Us, an uncompromisingly direct geographical expose on the challenges and dilemmas facing American agriculture.

Hart is concerned with major questions of the future of American agriculture: from over-specialization and the reality of foreign competition to convoluted farm policies that regulate production and encourage dependency on federal subsidies. Without a long term plan, he argues that to be competitive, U.S. farmers have little choice but to cut expenses and increase production by expanding their farm …

Review Of Archaeology And Ethnohistory Of The Omaha Indians: The Big Village Site By John M. O'Shea And John Ludwickson, Robin Ridington

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Until recently, anthropological archaeology considered the burial grounds of Native Americans to be a proper subject of scientific investigation with little or no consideration for the cultural values of contemporary Native people regarding the resting places of their ancestors. Between 1939 and 1941 archaeologists from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln excavated cemeteries and dwelling sites of the Omaha tribe at the site of their former village near the present town of Homer, Nebraska. Known to Omahas as Ton'wontonga (Big Village), the site was occupied from 1775 to 1845. Under the direction ofJohn Champe, the remains of something like a hundred Omahas …

The Conservation Reserve Program: Habitat For Grassland Birds, Douglas H. Johnson, Michael D. Schwartz

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) has effected major changes to the landscape, especially in the northern Great Plains. Breeding birds have responded dramatically to habitat changes by colonizing CRP fields, often in large numbers. The vegetation in most CRP fields consists of introduced grasses and legumes, along with a variety of weedy species. This paper describes the bird populations found during three years of surveys on more than 300 CRP fields in western Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and eastern Montana. We relate densities of selected species to geographic location, annual effects, conservation practice adopted, and vegetation features.

Review Of Ecology And Human Organization On The Great Plains By Douglas B. Bamforth, David J. Wishart

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

In this compact book, the outgrowth, or reprint, of his dissertation, Douglas Bamforth focuses his attention on cultural-ecological relationships between Native American hunters and the physical environments of the Great Plains. Specifically, Bamforth is concerned with forging a link between the social organization of historic and prehistoric hunters and their resource base, particularly the bison. It is a thoroughly professional study, drawing from a wide array of interdisciplinary evidence. The reader is systematically led from initial theoretical considerations, where a predictive theory is postulated, through an exegesis of grassland and ungulate ecology, to the application of the theory to regional …

Review Of Economic Models Of Agricultural Land Conservation And Environmental Improvement By Earl O. Heady And Gary F. Vocke, Kent W. Olson

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

American agriculture faces many difficult and often conflicting challenges. It is expected to satisfy growing demands for agricultural commodities both at home and abroad at reasonable prices to consumers without impairing the productivity of the nation's cropland, exceeding the sustained yield of the country's water resources, or degrading the quality of the environment.

There is ample evidence that farmers have not fully achieved these goals. But can they? If not, are there policies that would still create an improvement in the status quo? The Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University has been at the forefront …

Southern Alberta’S Cadillac Desert, Mary C. Thompson

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Reisner (1986) coined the term "Cadillac Desert" to describe the high costs associated with irrigated agriculture in the American west. This concept can logically be extended to the northern-most reaches of the Great Plains in Canada to perform a critical analysis of irrigated agriculture in southern Alberta. Today irrigation technology, which arrived with the Mormon immigration of the 1880s, keeps over a million acres of former shortgrass prairie green. Costs of one of the world's largest snow melt irrigation systems are examined on several dimensions: the massive infusion of state funds necessary to build and maintain the system, environmental degradation …

Review Of Our Limits Transgressed: Environmental Political Thought In America By Bob Peperman Taylor, John Martin Gillroy

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

In this book Taylor traces the evolution of political thought about the environment from within a dialectic between two traditions: the "progressive" and the "pastoral." These traditions are described as having roots in the philosophies of Gifford Pinchot and Henry David Thoreau, respectively, and while this tracing of ancestry is not new or unique to this book, what Taylor does with this starting point is both creative and interesting.

Most books which entertain the analysis of theory applied to the environment concentrate on single dimensions of humanities' ethical or economic impact on nature, without a sense of how that particular …

Review Of Wild Animals And American Environmental Ethics By Lisa Mighetto, Ronald M. Case

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

I looked forward to reviewing Mighetto's book so I could set readers straight on the issue of animal rights and environmental ethics. I can quibble with many of her statements. She mentioned that organizations such as Ducks Unlimited were devoted to the protection of a single species. This is clearly false. She, perpetuates the simplified argument of the role of predators in regulating deer numbers in the Kaibab Forest. Most biologists recognize that major policy changes that eliminated grazing on the forest also contributed to, if not explained totally, an eruption of deer on the forest. And in a somewhat …

Review Of Law For The Elephant, Law For The Beaver: Essays In The Legal History Of The North American West By John Mclaren, Hamar Foster And Chet Orloff, Gordan Morris Bakken

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

This collection of twelve essays displays the vitality of Western legal history and the potential for fruitful exploration of transborder legal history. John Phillip Reid's masterful survey of Western American and Canadian legal history presents both the results of research and the contours of future scholarly inquiry for generations of legal historians. David Percy and John P. S. McLaren contribute insightful comparative essays on water law and anti-Chinese activities in courts and legislatures. Other essays cover frontier criminal justice administration, aboriginal rights, jurisdiction and extraterritoriality, the cultural and legal implications of anti-Chinese discrimination, and constitution-making. This ambitious book tells us …

Review Of The Beginnings Of Canadian Meteorology By Morley Thomas, Paul A. Kay

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The emergence of "global warming" as a prominent organizing theme in science and social science can be seen, for example, in the first issues of this journal. Our ability to anticipate future climates rests on our appreciation of current and past climates. Recognizable precursors of our standard meteorological instruments date from the seventeenth century, yet the systematic collection of standardized data from a sufficiently dense network of sites is, in most nations, barely a century-old activity. A history of meteorology can be doubly useful in providing reviews of early efforts at data collection and in providing context for current questions. …

Review Of Birds In Kansas, Volume Ii By Max C. Thompson And Charles Ely. Lawrence, Thomas E. Labedz

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

It has been nearly 30 years since the last of several excellent compendia of Kansas birds was published. Birds in Kansas continues this tradition and raises it to a new level of excellence for Kansas. Readers expecting a Kansas version of Robert's The Birds of Minnesota will be disappointed, but very few others can complain.

Birds of Kansas, Volume II is the final volume and contains an explanation of species accounts and accounts for the passerines. Volume I, published in 1989, contains introductory, historical, and physiographical chapters, an explanation of the species accounts, and accounts for non-passerines.

Each species account …

Review Of Ecology And Conservation Of Neotropical Migrant Landbirds By John M. Hagan Iii And David W. Johnston, William Scharf

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

When I first began to notice changes in the numbers and bird species that I netted on the Great Lakes' islands in the 1970s, I had little comprehension of the extent to which global modifications already underway were driving the changes in bird populations. With this compendium based on a symposium hosted by Manomet Bird Observatory in December, 1989, ornithologists can now substantiate the validity and seriousness of such earlier observations. The erosion of Neotropical bird populations is only one of many symptoms of planetary deterioration.

Atrazine In The Platte River And Lincoln Municipal Water, James D. Carr

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The City of Lincoln draws water from a well field along the banks of the Platte River near Ashland. Since 1989 we have monitored the infusion of atrazine into this well field via recharge from the Platte River. Samples of water from the river, several monitoring wells and production wells were analyzed by gas chromatography coupled to mass spectrometer following solid phase extraction. Atrazine concentrations were found to be less than 0.1 ppb before the growing season every year through 1989-1992. Atrazine in the Platte reached maximum concentrations of 5, 11, 19, and 19 ppb respectively in these years. These …

The Value On An Interdisciplinary Environmental Awareness: An Introduction, J. Allen Williams Jr.

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

This special issue of Great Plains Research brings together important and innovative environmentally-related research being conducted in what might be considered an "ecoregion," the Great Plains. Investigators from seven different disciplines explore topics that span the Great Plains from the southern border of Texas to the Canadian prairie provinces of Alberta and Manitoba. Their methods vary from highly focused experimental designs to broad-based policy analysis.

A review of the research topics covered in this issue might suggest they are as varied as the geographic locations, disciplinary affiliations, and methodological approaches of the researchers. In one sense, they are, but the …

Biological Control Of Weeds In Great Plains Rangelands, Svata M. Louda , Robert A. Masters

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Chemical control of weeds has increased agricultural productivity, but complete reliance on chemicals has serious drawbacks. These include high cost per acre, decreasing effectiveness, negative effects on plant community diversity, and increased opportunities for environmental contamination. One alternative is biocontrol, the use of biological factors that naturally limit weed populations. Long-term research goals focus on improving our knowledge of the processes that control and limit potential plant pests naturally and to use that knowledge to develop predictable, sustainable, low-cost, biologically-based weed management strategies. This paper reviews the ecological underpinnings of classical biological control of weeds, including basic research on the …

Review Of Groundwater Exploitation In The High Plains By David E. Kromm And Stephen E. White, Vincent H. Dreeszen

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

This volume focuses on irrigation water use, specifically the history of groundwater development and use, i.e. its "exploitation," on the High Plains. Starting in the southern part of the High Plains in the 1930s groundwater irrigation moved rapidly northward through western Oklahoma, western Kansas and into much of Nebraska after World War II. Rocks of different ages in the High Plains comprise the aquifer popularly known as the Ogallala Aquifer but is more appropriately called the High Plains Aquifer by the U.S. Geological Survey. Depletion of the aquifer as indicated by water-level declines, greatest in the drier southern and western …

Editor's Note - Volume 3, Number 1, Clare V. Mckanna Jr.

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The manuscripts for this special issue of Great Plains Research devoted to environmental concerns were selected by guest-editor J. Allen Williams, Jr. Editing and manuscript preparation were completed by the editor and editorial staff of Great Plains Research.

Under An Open Sky: Rethinking America'swestern Past. William Cronon,, John R. Wunder

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Environmental studies is a growing field that brings new knowledge almost every day and certainly with every press's new listings. Many Western social scientists are attracted to it as a means of explicating the past, present, and future of North America. It is not new to Western historians. James C. Malin and Walter Prescott Webb were two pathfinders in studies of the environment over five to seven decades ago, but ecological impacts on human actions were somewhat forgotten by historians in the interim. During the past fifteen years environmental history has become a staple in studies of the American West. …

Environmental Impact Assessment In Practice: Exploring The Contradictions, Joel Novek

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Since its introduction into Canada in 1973, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) has been controversial. Proponents argue that EIA is a practical means of achieving sustainable development because major projects are subject to an independent review before they are issued a license to proceed. However, the government's role in promoting resource-based development such as the ALPAC pulp mill (northern Alberta) and the Repap mills (northern Manitoba) has attracted considerable resistance. Public opposition to pulp and paper megaprojects in western Canada has reinforced the contradiction between the government's role as development promoter and as protector of northern resources and aboriginal populations.

Analysis …

Estimated Effect Of Alternative Production Practices On Profit And Ground Water Quality: Texas Seymour Aquifer, Ronald D. Lacewell, Manzoor E. Chowdhury, Kelly J. Bryant, Jimmy R. Williams, Verel W. Benson

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

The Seymour aquifer of north-central Texas is identified as containing elevated levels of nitrate. The area has been designated as a Hydrologic Unit Area under the President's Water Quality Initiative. The effect of alternative production practices on the relative changes in nitrate leaching through the vadose zone was measured by adding an extended soil profile in the EPIC-WQ simulation model. Net returns from alternative production methods were estimated by using returns from associated yield and adjusting the cost of different levels of nitrogen, irrigation, and harvesting. Trade offs between nitrate percolation and net returns were explored by plotting the net …

Table Of Contents - Volume 3, Number 2

Great Plains Research: A Journal of Natural and Social Sciences (through 2013)

Table of Contents

Wpa News 41 (1993), World Pheasant Association

Galliformes Specialist Group and Affiliated Societies: Newsletters

WPA News (August 1993), number 41

Published by the World Pheasant Association

A Quality Assessment Using The Baldrige Criteria: Non-Academic Service Units In A Large University, Susan M. Fritz

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

"More for less" has become the challenge for higher education in the 90's. Budgets in higher education are shrinking at unprecedented rates, programs and services are being cut, and morale is plummeting. As a result, administrators are looking for creative reforms as they try to maintain quality on smaller budgets. One such reform is Total Quality Management (TQM). TQM has been widely applied to business and industry and the spread of TQM has been encouraged by a government-supported competition based on quality called the Malcolm Baldrige Award. The Baldrige Award scrutinizes seven areas: leadership, information and analysis, strategic quality planning, …

A Determination Of Primary Teacher Problems Of Nebraska Agricultural Educators, Timothy W. Laughlin

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

No abstract provided.