ANDREW CAVEN: Forty-pound bag, got all my plant books in here. I mean I got the key Flora of Nebraska picture books.

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JOSHUA WIESE: Everything relies on vegetation, and maybe even more so, the soil determines what vegetation is there.

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JOSHUA WIESE: Vegetation determines what fauna and what small insects you might find in an area. The native species of plants support native species of animals.

ANDREW CAVEN: Plants make up the basis of the food web. What plants grow where is determined by land-use history, soil type, flooding frequency. What plants are there is basically natureís garden for all the species that inhabit this planet.

NARRATOR: The Crane Trust, located in South Central, Nebraska includes forty-five hundred acres of some of the largest wet tall-grass prairies remaining in America. This land supports astounding diversity of organisms and biological proactivity that make the Platte River Prairies thrive.  

ANDREW CAVEN: This whole web is very intertwined, and when we start to lose components, thereís a tipping point where it will no longer function. So, the relationship between the insects and the plants is absolutely integral. And if one of those components disappears, you start to see a rapid decrease in diversity.

NARRATOR: There are around two-hundred and twenty-seven total grass species in Nebraska and seventy-eight grass species in the Platte River Valley alone. Crane Trust scientists established an herbarium to preserve and collect plant specimens.

JOSHUA WIESE: An herbarium is a museum, and a database, and a way to document historical plants on property.

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JOSHUA WIESE: The importance of an herbarium is, again, to keep records. As far as the species go, we can see how these species are changing over time and see what has been here in the past, and what are we losing.

ANDREW CAVEN: This is the second herbarium Iíve been involved in starting and I find it to be very, very important. Plants cannot be underestimated in their importance to the ecology. They just provide all this food. The seed supports all the dickcissels, and you know, all the sparrows that come through, and also supports the insects which are food for other songbirds like bobolinks.

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ANDREW CAVEN: If you donít have this gigantic flush in diversity of seed and nectar resources, you really donít have a functioning prairie ecosystem. The process of an herbarium is so much more than just documenting whatís there at one particular time. Itís a tool to look into so many questions. Vegetation in general is very interesting to me because of the microcosms that exist all over the landscape. You can have a small change in soils, or just the face at which a small hill is oriented toward the sun, and that will totally change what plants predominate, especially in very diverse systems.

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ANDREW CAVEN: To me itís a way of reading the landscape. Plants call tell you about the history of a place.

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