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I appreciate seeing what you're doing with these controlled burns to prevent range fires. Martin, it might also be good to add a little information for those who don't know as to why you specifically want to burn the cedar trees.

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Hi Krystine, thank you for posting. I should have put this link in the stack you read. This explains why these trees are being targeted. The Great Plains is loosing 1-2% of its grasslands per year to these cedar trees.

This link is very interesting. It covers grasslands lost to cedars since 1990.

This is just Custer County - the area I help in is around Arnold.

Tree cover in 2022 33,713 acres

Tree cover change since 1990 +27,434 acres

In my teens and 20’s I used to hunt in Custer County and in the Sandhills. Its been subtle change but now its startling. We have a 90 acre pasture that had no trees when we bought it in 2012, in 2020 cedar started showing up, we burnt them 2021 and this summer we are going out to cut the ones that did not burn. It looks like a small forest now. Sandhills fauna such as prairie chicken and grouse leave areas with trees as the trees hold predators.

https://www.wlfw.org/yieldgap/Nebraska/Custer/index.html

This is the stack covering why these trees have a bounty on them.

Again thank you for reading my stack and commenting. Input helps me write better more informative stacks

https://open.substack.com/pub/martinhoer/p/the-stealth-invader-of-the-great?r=8mxhw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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