Melinda Smith
Colorado State University-Fort Collins, CO·Ecology & Evolution
What happens to a grassland when bison return after more than a century of absence? The American bison was once the main large grazer of the Central Plains, but by the early 1900s it had nearly disappeared.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Plant Science & Agriculture
- Topics
bison
rewilding
reintroduction
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2029
What they work on
- 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.
- Test whether bison raise plant diversity by selectively eating palatable dominant grasses in a C3 (cool-season) grassland, measuring dry matter digestibility, a gauge of how digestible forage is.
- Test whether herbicide application and native plant seeding speed grassland recovery, reduce nonnative plant invasion, and increase forage amount and quality under bison grazing.
- Combine field data on plant productivity and plant and soil nutrients with remote sensing data, using explainable AI and machine learning to find how to make bison grazing most useful for rangeland health.
More about the research
Bison reintroduction is now becoming more common, yet most of what is known about bison effects comes from tallgrass prairie. It is unclear whether those lessons hold in other grassland types across the animal's native range. In fall 2026, the Blackfeet Tribal Nation in northern Montana plans to release free-roaming bison onto 26,000 acres of montane fescue grassland, one of the largest rewilding efforts in the US. This creates a rare chance to watch an ecosystem respond from the start.
Why it matters
Ranchers, tribal land managers and conservation agencies that manage grazing lands could use these results to decide when and how to bring back bison. The work may show whether bison, alone or combined with herbicide and native seeding, can restore degraded montane grasslands, reduce invasive plants and improve forage for grazing animals on important rangelands.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Zakary Ratajczak
Kansas State University, KS·Ecology & Evolution
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.
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.
Thomas Miller
Rice University, TX·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether Epichloë fungi are most beneficial to host grasses in stressful years, using 15–20 years of demographic data from a symbiont-removal experiment across seven grass species.
The school
Colorado State University-Fort Collins: 23 labs on PI Pages, $466M a year on research, 276 research doctorates a year.
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