Southern High Plains

This opportunity to work together in the Southern High Plains comes at a key time in the history of land protection. The world is suffering massive ecosystem degradation, unprecedented wildlife declines and extinctions. This has spurred a large movement for land protection. 

“There is palpable energy and momentum pointing toward a different future for grasslands, where we’re able to affect conservation at the scales we need,” says Galen Guerrero-Murphy, director of TNC’s Southern High Plains Initiative.

Through protecting habitat, we can help the world’s species be more resilient to climate change and other human disturbances, such as pollution or agriculture. To have the greatest impact, we need to protect lands with a variety of habitat that supports wildlife now and into the future. TNC has developed a mapping tool to identify exactly those places in the U.S., called the Resilient Connected Network. 

The Southern High Plains is a high priority within the Resilient Connected Network. This region has the most opportunity for conserving large, connected landscapes that allow grassland species to move, adapt and thrive. The resilient areas in the Southern High Plains are less than 11% conserved today.

While each of the five states in the Southern High Plains faces its own challenges and opportunities, there are common themes that unite them. Across the region, land conservation is closely connected with local economic and community values.

In Kansas, around 80% of the state’s grasslands have been converted to some other use, mainly cropland. “What we’re focused on in this landscape is that 20% that’s left,” says Matt Bain, conservation program manager for TNC in Kansas. “That 20% fuels a multi-billion-dollar beef industry in Kansas and is critically important to ranching economies. It's the ranchers who are taking care of what’s left of the last wild places in Kansas. You can’t conserve that 20% without partnership with ranchers.”

People who work on the land have strong connections to it and are essential for any successful conservation strategy.  

"In predominantly farming and ranching communities, people generally have deep ties to the land. They make their living off of it, but they also appreciate it, and it’s in their interest to conserve it,” says Dan Snodgrass, director of Land Protection and Stewardship for TNC in Texas.   

Partnerships are what will power this initiative to reach its ambitious goals. By working closely with local communities, conservation and agricultural partners and others who know and depend on the land, we can support projects already happening on the ground and link them together as part of a broader vision. 

If we want people to care about conserving nature, they first have to experience it firsthand. That’s why TNC is committed to developing projects that conserve vulnerable landscapes, connect people with nature, and boost local economies.

Within the Southern High Plains, Fishers Peak State Park is an example of how conservation, recreation and economic vitality can go hand in hand. 

In 2017, the city of Trinidad, Colorado, approached TNC and the Trust for Public Land (TPL) for help in purchasing a 30-square-mile ranch just a few miles north of the New Mexico border.

TNC and TPL purchased the property for $25.4 million “in hopes of raising the bar for combining conservation and recreation,” says Matt Moorhead, conservation partnerships director for TNC in Colorado.  

To balance conservation of the landscape’s natural resources with well-managed recreational access and educational use, TNC worked with community members and stakeholders on a collaborative planning process. 

In 2020, Fishers Peak became Colorado’s 42nd state park, with hopes of eventually connecting it to other protected land across the New Mexico border.