 Our next speaker is going to be Dr. Kyle McClain. Dr. McClain is a research ecologist at the Northern Plain Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in Jamestown, North Dakota. Kyle uses his background in community ecology to research the mechanisms that maintain aquatic and sometimes terrestrial biodiversity and prairie landscapes and identify ways to preserve and monitor biodiversity in small aquatic ecosystems. He earned his bachelor's of science degree in fish and wildlife service in fisheries and wildlife science at Valley City State University and his master's and PhD at North Dakota State University. Today, Kyle will be presenting with his co-authors, Climate and Land Use Driven Ecosystem, Homogenization and the Prairie Pondtle Region. Let's welcome Kyle. Yeah, it's good to be here. I actually, I'm more of an aquatic ecologist, so I didn't think I'd have any like answers, but I have seen 100% removal of Kentucky bluegrass working wetlands. And there are times where it completely goes away, especially in the recent 15 years. Also, so this talk is going to be a little bit broad, and I'm going to steal a joke from my colleague Amy. It's kind of a captain obvious talk, especially for all you, but it's really piecing together kind of theoretical concepts and evidence from the literature to tell a story of, well, the individual components might all be common knowledge to all of you, but trying to link them together and tell that story. A lot of what I like to focus on is biodiversity and systems, especially prairie wetland ecosystems. I mean, specifically wetlands for me, but it's hard to understand prairie wetlands without also looking at the prairies themselves. So biodiversity is another one. It's kind of becoming a more prevalent management priority, especially in the US, but it's also a buzzword, and I feel like a lot of people don't understand it, because most people think biodiversity and it's the number of species and just kind of that straight up alpha diversity, but it actually encompasses all life forms, ecosystems and processes. So this could be genetic diversity, taxonomic or functional diversity, and then that ecosystem or habitat diversity. So many consider our current era, the Anthropocene, which is often considered as a phase of mass extinction caused by humans. So in freshwater, biodiversity loss is probably among the most prevalent compared to other ecosystems. And with that wetlands in particular are kind of interesting because they make up a majority of the surface water for all the freshwater ecotypes. And the amount of loss and degradation to these systems is also among the highest of all ecotypes. But the thing about wetlands is they lack long-term and standardized across large spatial areas, biomonitoring data. So they're kind of left out in most of these synthesis papers that talk about the rates of biodiversity loss. So likely it's occurring, but there isn't that cohesive effort to really understand it, what rate that's happening. And I also assuming this holds true for the prairies as well. So for example, this is a recent figure from a recent nature paper that they put up a map of what was the historic extent of wetland area. So darker the green, the more wetlands. And so that was in the year 1700. And then this is, you can see in Eastern North Dakota, this is the percent of wetlands that have been mostly drained, but you know, lost for a variety of reasons. So the theme of my talk is ecosystem homogenization in the prairie pothole region with a emphasis on wetlands, but also talk about prairies as well as they're connected. So this is a recent paper from my dissertation. And here's the conceptual model for it. And I'll go through some of these different components, but really climate shifts, surrounding land use change and historic wetland loss all interact together cause directional changes in ponded water, hydro variability, water chemistry, biological communities, and then the spatial organization and where these systems exist. And you know, that those directional changes work together to what call an ecosystem homogenization. The invasive species component should probably be incorporated into the conceptual model, but I don't know where to put it. You know, there's the human facilitated dispersal and then there's these mechanisms that might promote invasive. So it could go in a lot of different places. So historic and contemporary prairie loss. So 70% of the historical prairies in the Great Plains have been converted primarily to cropland or for agricultural purposes, but it's important to note that that loss is not random in space or time. So of the grasslands biomes, like 90% of the Paul grass in the Northern Great Plains has been lost, 75% Dakota's mixed prairie and 50% of short grass. So some systems are grassland types are harder than others. And this, different than wetlands, this loss continues to present day for grassland conversion in the Western Corn Belt for the United States is occurring at very high rates comparable to the tropical rainforest in South America and is kind of the highest rate of conversion since the 1920s and 30s. So here's a map from nature serve that kind of shows a terrestrial, native terrestrial ecosystem loss. So you can see the darker reds, more loss. Eastern North Dakota, actually all of North Dakota, you know, this would be grassland biome, mostly a lot of majority of those natural systems have been converted to other uses. And this is also correlated with the amount of that area that is protected or conservation programs. And on the wetlands side of things, so similarly in the prairie pothole region, 65% of wetlands have been lost or displaced through draining, filling and leveling, we know where the basins are where we didn't lose them. And this loss is not random. In North Dakota, it's estimated about 50%, but like in the Des Moines lobe of Iowa, it's over 90% in most places. And the types of wetlands that have been drained or filled are also not random. So most of these were these temporarily ponded small basins or seasonally ponded, but to make sense because they'd be the easiest to drain. You wouldn't wanna, you know, try to drain a large lake, you didn't have to, and most of that drainage goes into those larger water bodies. Many of you have probably seen this image, but from or read the article, but this is just a nice figure, everybody reuses to our picture to show kind of what a native wetland prairie landscape versus a heavily drained landscape adjacent to each other it looks like. And now we got the climate change component. So this data is from Stutzman County, North Dakota. And this is looking at the Parmal Polymer Hydrological Drought Index and Equix. You can see that beginning in 1993, there's a shift in means, but also a shift in extremes of things being wetter. And then, you know, the during drought periods, they're less severe from a hydrological standpoint. And then this is also from Stutzman County. And don't pay attention, it hasn't increased 50 degrees in Celsius and temperature, but this is a cumulative departure from the norm. So this is really just showing trends and the precipitation trend and the temperature trend has also been increasing steadily from around the same time period. Eventually I'll get these up and down arrows correct. But then when you combine climate and land use interactions, you see a lot of other things that are working together. So increased precipitation plus increased surface water inputs is a general trend. So consolidation drainage, that was the prominent way wetlands were drained early on. And here's a figure from a paper on my colleagues over in McKenna did where they modeled a terminal wetland basin that has been wetlands were consolidated into and they modeled the water surface area. In blue is if there was no drainage and in red, if there is drainage. So you can see there's always more water entering the wetlands, but also when the amount of, when these wetlands get really full and the amount of precipitation is high enough, it eventually does kind of even out. Increased cropline. So cropline has higher runoff rates of water. So smooth surface, snow melt precipitation. So if it's a cropline embedded wetland, more of that water in the catchment is going to enter that wetland quicker. Heavy grazing does a lot of the same thing. And interesting one to me that I don't think there's maybe someone in the room knows, but a clear answer is the Kentucky bluegrass and smooth brome invasions when they become dominant parts of the grasslands. There's some evidence that would suggest lower infiltration and also higher runoff, but these are also still rough surfaces. So maybe those even out, but I think that is something that is from a wetland hydrology standpoint worth looking at further. So to kind of make this climate land use interaction point more clear, here's some figures that recycled also from Owen, looking at what he called the eco hydrological state shift. So beginning in 1993, and we can see that soil moisture for studs. Well, this is from North Dakota in Stutsman County too. Most of this is all from around Stutsman County. Continental Bay study area wetland depths have had dramatic increases. So that's 18 long-term, 18 wetlands in a long-term study that have been monitored for, you know, 50 years. And stream discharge in North Dakota, and these are streams just looking at discharge raised in streams that are not dammed up or portions of streams that aren't dammed up. And then groundwater levels at Cottonwood Lake study area have also increased during this timeframe. Devil's Lake and the number of ponds from the Fish and Wildlife Service is annual pond counts. And with all this increased precipitation and water on the landscape, we also have seen an increase in tile drain permits, which also makes sense with the amount of water that we're trying to get rid of on the landscape. There's more tile drains being put in. So here's a few case studies. So this is all data from the Cottonwood Lake study area. So it shows all our wetlands. The blue lines are permanent wetlands. So these are larger, more permanently ponded water bodies. And then the green ones are the small wetland basins. And then these orange ones are kind of intermediate, but they have inflows and outflows that mediate water levels. So for the state shift, we see that permanent wetland ponds are the ones that are most susceptible to having a state shift. So you can see there was a lot of variation early on, but after 1993, it kind of shifted to a new more open water state. And what this looks like zoomed out, here's a drought in 1992. And then in 2011, the same area. And looking at that, you'd be like, how is this homogenization? It's a lot of water. So that is true. There's a lot of variability in the amount of water and kind of the size of it, but you saw a lot of blue on it. So 1983 is kind of a good year to look at the previous climate cycle. All these different colors represent different vegetation zones. So those vegetation zones have different structural properties and different species in them. Blue is open water state. So in 1992, you can see how these wetlands dried up. And then in 2011, which really looks like pretty much every year since about 1997, you can see these larger wetlands are almost entirely open water. And that's been the state they've been in for a while. But once again, these more temporarily ponded wetlands seemed a little less susceptible to completely shifting their ecological state. Here's another case study. So this was done by a grad student at SDSU, Ryan Cressy, where she, if you're familiar with the Steward and Cantrued wetland classification system, they had a bunch of wetlands in Studsman County that they looked at and recorded their vegetation or vegetative communities. And so here's a picture of the Crystal Springs study area. So this is in 1964. You can see some open water, but these are all disconnected wetland basins. And then when Ryan did her study in 2012, all these individual basins have pretty much been connected into one permanent open water habitat. Similar, you go up on the Missouri Cateau. So the Crystal Springs is a glacial outwash area. So it's low elevation. So these basins tend to be bigger, but then up on the Missouri Cateau, the Cottenwood, this is not the Lake study area, but this is the Cottenwood WPA, Cottenwood Lake WPA. I can also see there's all these basins for our study sites were disconnected. And there is quite a bit of fill and merging, fill and spilling going on and increases in surface area. And then my favorite on this one is the Bob Stewart WPA. So this is on a high elevation marine. And this is the only one that you don't really see a lot of changes in the surface water area. But if you look at all these networks, they have natural inflows and outflows. So what happens is wetlands fill up, their depth is mediated. So they don't just expand and engulf other wetlands. All that water flows down elevation off of the marine. So here's what her plots look like for depth. So you can see permanent and semi-permanent wetlands over the ones that change the most, especially Crystal Springs and the Cottenwood study areas, but not so much with the temporary and seasonal wetlands. And then also as these wetlands fill and become diluted, you also get changes in water chemistry. So I mentioned the Crystal Springs is in that outwash area, it's low elevation. A lot of these wetlands, especially the permanent wetlands would receive groundwater that accumulates over time. So historically, a lot of variation in salinity. So there's very salty wetlands in Western Stetsman County and then parts of Kidder County. And then in the resample, that variation went down to almost nothing. And in the Cottenwood study area, you actually see an increase in salinity. And this is also interesting because that is probably because the groundwater level increased. So these wetlands are now getting groundwater that's accumulating over time that historically probably would not have gotten any groundwater. And they're also just getting a lot more water flow that is holding salts, because they're not recharging, perhaps, they're not losing salts. And the Mount Raya are now called Bobsterer WPAs. Not much of a change. And then with the semi-permanent wetlands, semi-permanent wetlands typically were above the water table. But you also see this shift, some of this shift is probably doing to salty wetlands, merging with fresh wetlands, and it becomes the same salinity. And so overall, if you look at these values between the increases in semi-permanence and decreases in permanent wetlands, that just overall range in salinity is much more narrow than it was in the 60s. I did a resample from a master's thesis. That was a similar one by George Swanson. So these wetlands are sampled in 66 to 76. So this is also the Crystal Springs area. So in this figure you can see the range was from 35,000 microseconds. So that's almost seawater down to 2,000. And now that they're all connected up, the range is 4,000 to 7,000. And you can see that in this graph as well. That's the loss of these saline systems, which are really unique habitats and have a lot of really unique plant and invertebrate communities. And with this, you get larger water bodies and reduced salinity concentrations. I looked at the dissolved ion concentrations before perch collination and lakes that did not have perch in the 60s and 70s. That do now you can see in the red. This is the historical. And now that they have perch in them, they're in this much narrower range of water chemistry space. So biodiversity and land use changed. So the direct impacts of grassland and wetland loss on biodiversity. So loss of wetlands and prairies is gonna be a loss of wetland and prairie specialists, species, biota in these systems. And then when you, especially this directional loss for certain areas and certain systems, you lose dispersal between these systems, which in prairie and wetland landscapes, the dispersal is huge. Yeah, the disproportionate loss of small wetlands, which are often considered kind of those stepping stone systems for dispersal. And there are also systems that have specialist taxa that actually require drying phases and things like that. So you don't really find them in your lake like habitats. Disportionate loss of grassland types. So once again, like the tall grass prairie is gonna have a disproportionate effect on tall grass prairie species. With ecological, geological state shifts. So the ecological, hydrological dynamics alters community assembly. We've seen this shifts in air temperature, nutrient level, soil moisture, management practice. You can also alter prairie community assembly. And then these rapid state shifts. So this is more theoretical, but it provides opportunities for invasive or other are selected dispersers or reproducers for colonization, which can lead to priority effects. Here's just a quick example at the longterm study that I run. We have the small depressions that near the first half of the study, they were upland habitats. They were terrestrial habitats. But in the recent 15 years, they started to pond water and they actually developed wetland plant communities. We did look, they have hydric soil. So these are now wetlands. So these systems here, I compared their invertebrate communities last year to other small wetlands that we've been studying for a long time. We could see that species diversity was much lower in these new wetlands, even though most people go into them and assume they're about the same. And if you look at the components of the species diversity is dominated by insects with very few crustaceans, well, insects, fly, they're the ones that are gonna get to these systems more. The crustaceans are typically highly associated with these habitats and can be high abundance. We found very low abundance and they're really reliant on egg banks. And similarly with the plant communities, you can see there is overall more diversity in the systems that have been wetlands for a long time to these new wetlands and the proportion of non-native species is much higher. So it's pretty much all the non-native wetland species that we have at the Cottonwood study area, we're in these small wetlands already, but very few of the native species where once again, going back to how invertebrates have egg banks, there's probably less seed banks there. So biotic modernization is something I'm particularly interested in. So this is the process in which ecosystems lose biological uniqueness, also decreasing beta diversity, typically driven by biological invasions. So in this case, our alpha diversity, our species richness doesn't always decrease. In some cases, it increases. This is a very common pattern in aquatic ecosystems. For example, in the prairie potholes, the invasion of fish and deplete vertebrate communities and replace the native amphibian communities. So a lot of evidence for this, you can see on the right side, this is, oh, which is this. Yeah, this is the fishless habitats and then these dark circles of the ones with fish, totally different invertebrate communities and amphibians are more on the opposite side of fathead minnows. Replacement of native wetland vegetation with invasive plants and other commonly observed pattern in North Dakota and elsewhere in the prairie pothole region. Invasive plants in the North Dakota prairies are ubiquitous, so we just know that. Prominent wetland invasives. So in our wet meadows and shallow marsh, Kentucky bluegrass, smooth brome and reed canary grass are especially problematic. Shallow marsh to deep marsh, invasive typhoon species, so either the hybrid or narrowleaf. This is also from Ryan Cressy's work. I just wanted to point out this figure. So this is invasive typhoon, the deep marsh zones from the resample. So they've increased, but the native type of the broadleaf was almost non-existent in the resample and this is a pattern. I almost never see broadleaf cattail, but you can see a lot of the deep marsh species are declining, but the native or invasive typhoon is increasing. So potential mechanisms even facilitated, excuse me, dispersal, disturbance and state shifts, changes in water level variability. So that's especially relevant to like cattails, upland conditions and depleted seed banks. So yeah, even restoration can actually lead to more biotic homogenization if not done, where you're thinking about your seeding mixtures. So primary drivers, I'm gonna go ahead for the sake of time and this was already presented and skip that.