Written collaboratively by W. Carter Johnson and Malia A. Volke. Original publication date 2015.
The Mortenson Ranch Story is a remarkable account of the restoration of a western South Dakota landscape devastated early in the 20th century by homesteading and drought.
Acknowledgments
This long-term project conducted by several SDSU faculty and staff only could have been done with stable funding from the SDSU Agricultural Experiment Station and SDSU Extension within the South Dakota State University College of Agriculture and Biological Sciences in Brookings. As part of the research component, specific funding from the McIntire-Stennis forestry program was critical to be able to monitor woodland restoration success over a 20 year period.
We thank the Mortenson family for the long collaboration history, numerous collegial discussions, learning in both directions, and for their review and constructive comments on this report. Susan Boettcher took the woody draw project “under her wing” at the start in 1992 and deserves considerable credit for the initial establishment of the permanent transects and publication of many of the results of the project during its first decade. Craig Olawsky followed Susan on the woody draw project and helped us re-measure the Foster Creek cross sections. Todd Epp put together a splendid and popular video with South Dakota Public Broadcasting on the Mortenson Ranch that was shown on television dozens if not a hundred times in the early to mid-1990s. Bruce Harris tallied birds on the Mortenson Ranch and surprised us all when we found out how well the avifauna had recovered. Many assisted in putting together this report: Kent Jensen worked with Doug Backlund to provide us with the incredibly beautiful photos of birds for our report and assisted in the compilation of the master bird list for the ranch; Gary Larson worked with Jim Johnson to provide the comparably high quality photos of many of the key species of plants found on the Mortenson Ranch; Larry Janssen assisted in making economic data available to our project; Dave Archer, Cody Zilverberg, and Lora Perkins provided constructive comments on the manuscript.
