Zakary Ratajczak
Kansas State University, KS·Ecology & Evolution
Severe multi-year droughts have hit the grasslands of the Great Plains before and will likely become more common. When the Dust Bowl drought struck, hunting had already removed bison and other large grazers.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Plant Science & Agriculture
- Topics
grassland ecology
tallgrass prairie
drought
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Test multiple rainout shelter designs at Konza Prairie to determine whether bison use areas under shelters at similar rates as unsheltered areas, by quantifying bison use and activity.
- Assess whether bison damage or destroy rainout shelters, and iteratively modify shelter designs to withstand large grazers.
- Measure whether shelters block enough rainfall to simulate extreme drought, aiming for a 50% reduction in soil moisture under the shelters.
- Generate pilot data to design a larger experiment that manipulates drought and grazing independently to test their combined effects on prairie plant communities.
More about the research
So scientists do not know how these animals, which strongly change grassland soils and plants in normal years, affect how grasslands cope with extreme drought. Answering this matters for questions like whether grazed tallgrass prairie can still provide good forage, and whether plant diversity that supports pollinators will hold up.
Why it matters
Rangeland managers and ranchers in the Great Plains could use these results to set grazing practices for drier conditions. The tested shelter designs could let scientists run larger experiments on drought and grazing together, improving forecasts of how grasslands, forage and pollinator-supporting plant diversity respond to future droughts.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Melinda Smith
Colorado State University-Fort Collins, CO·Ecology & Evolution
Measure how free-roaming bison change plant species makeup and diversity in Montana montane fescue grasslands, comparing 12 grazed plots with matched fenced plots before and after reintroduction.
Sara Baer
University of Kansas, KS·Ecology & Evolution
Model how climate conditions during the planting year steer the long-term trajectory of restored grassland plant communities, using species composition data from restorations established every other year over twelve years in one agricultural field.
Melanie Derby
Kansas State University, KS·Engineering
Test whether the way soil-wetting bacteria Bacillus subtilis spread water through soil depends on soil type, starting moisture, soil water-repellency and application method, using lab, greenhouse and field experiments.
The school
Kansas State University: 7 labs on PI Pages, $265M a year on research, 201 research doctorates a year.
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