The following statement was made to the Boulder City Council on behalf of PLAN-Boulder County by Ray Bridge on May 18, 2010.

Grasslands Ecosystem Management Plan

I’m speaking tonight on behalf of PLAN-Boulder County.

We strongly urge the Council to adopt the Grasslands Ecosystem Management Plan. It has been years in the making. Looking back through my notes, I saw that PLAN-Boulder County endorsed a draft of the plan just over two years ago. We held a public forum on it in January 2008, and of course it was being worked on by OSMP long before that. The history of PLAN-Boulder County involvement with the public process on the plan goes back to 2008, as well.

It is time to adopt this plan and begin to reap the benefits of its implementation, as budget constraints permit, rather than continuing to wordsmith it for another year.

The plan is nearly 400 pages long, but let me summarize a few of its benefits.

• It divides the OSMP grasslands into categories using an inspired amalgam of ecosystem types, management goals, and specific management targets. Thus, mixed grass prairie, xeric tallgrass prairie, and mesic bluestem prairie, wetlands, and riparian areas represent specific ecosystems within the 24,000 acres of city-owned lands. White Rocks is a unique location with plant communities and geologic features found nowhere else. Agricultural land is managed for agricultureundefinedwhich is, of course a specific Charter purpose. Black-tailed prairie dogs and their associates are a specific management target, and areas suitable for them make up a specific conservation element.
• This categorization seems logically to be an odd juxtaposition of apples and oranges, but it is carefully crafted to allow the department to efficiently monitor the health of the system and to practice adaptive management of the resources, from the state natural area, to productive agricultural activities, to rare plants and habitat, to healthy prairie dog colonies.
• The conservation management approach used in the plan has been well-proven. It is scientifically based, the targets, attributes, and indicators have been well-chosen, and it gives us the tools we need to continue to manage our irreplaceable natural resources and to maintain them for our children and their grandchildren. These are particularly important in an era of global climate change, where scientific projections indicate that our invaluable relict grassland ecosystems will be placed under serious stress by rising temperatures, increasing drought frequency, and ever-more-challenging invasive weeds.

Boulder has happily developed an ever-more-enlightened approach to prairie dog management. When I first came to Boulder, lethal control of varmints was the order of the day. On OSMP hikes for schoolchildren, we now emphasize that prairie dogs are a keystone species, vital for the survival and health of innumerable other species.

However, we have to recognize that prairie dog habitat is now so reduced and fragmented that it is impossible to re-establish conditions where normal predation and migration patterns can be relied on to maintain healthy conditions either for prairie dogs, for the plants on which they feed, or for predators like golden eagles that rely on them. Humans building parking lots, highways, agriculture, and ball fields mean that we can only maintain healthy prairie dog populations with active management. The problem is further compounded by the arrival of plague, which now affects colonies in complicated ways that are still only partly understood.

It would be a disastrous error to view all open space grasslands as a potential dumping ground for prairie dogs, whenever they are displaced by other human activities.  Maintaining healthy grass ecosystems often dictates that prairie dogs not be introduced when the native grasses are being reintroduced or are under other stress. Prairie dogs are not only herbivores; they aggressively mow down tall grass around burrows to improve their view of possible predators.

Without going into every detail, we believe that after many iterations, the plan now contains the right suite of tools to allow the department to manage prairie dogs and other conservation objectives effectively. OSMP has proven to be highly competent to do so, given those tools. We urge that Council adopt the plan as revised.

Thank you.