Flint Hills ranch offers vast research possibilities for WSU scientists

Leaders at Wichita State University thought it was their scientists who’d be happiest with the donation giving them access to a 4,700-acre Flint Hills ranch.

But the university’s art faculty might want to scout the ranch, too.

Greg Houseman earlier this week opened a steel gate at the north end of the Youngmeyer Ranch, a short drive south of Beaumont in Butler County, and rolled his WSU pickup into the limestone track used by semitrailers to take cattle in and out of the vast grassland surrounding it.

It was near sundown. What followed was one of those sky-and-sundown shows that only the Flint Hills can display.

Houseman, an associate professor of biology, parked at the top of the upland bluff overlooking a steep drop-off into a deep, yawning lowland to the east.

To the west: pale, white blades from a dozen or so wind turbines turned slowly against a backdrop of a sunset of pale yellow, pink and red, with the sun’s rays touching faint clouds.

To the east: the valley of lowland prairie stretching to the horizon, colored like a vast painting in the pale greens, yellows and rusts created when the low light of a Kansas sundown combines with the colors of Kansas prairie grass and a few shoots of red sumac.

“Look at that,” he said. To the east, faint as it rose from the hazy horizon, was a fat, pink full moon.

Houseman’s research involves the facts and mysteries of plant communities and how they interact. So it’s logical to make him one of the point people WSU will send to the ranch.

Ranchers need the advice he and others can offer: How to save the Flint Hills from invasive plants like Sericea lespedeza. Whether rotational patch-burning might take better care of grasslands.

He said scientists studying birds, insects, geology and the anthropology of the ancestors of Native Americans will find much to study.

But he also pointed out that the beauty of this ranch, an hour’s drive east and south of Wichita, should impress anyone. He grew up in Michigan but admires what he sees here. The beauty and the land are already appreciated by the people who work it, he said. One thing WSU will do as it takes up work on the ranch: tread lightly.

“As beautiful as all this is, you can see why people who work and live out here have very strong feelings about the land,” he said.

It’s not all about extracting profits and income from the grassland, he said. People out here care about the land, the wildlife, the view, even the sounds of the prairie. In the lowland below his feet, amid all that beauty of distance and light and color, crickets chirped and birds sang.

Only a minute or so after he had driven through the gate, a covey of prairie chickens had risen from the stone track and flown in a straight line to the southwest. The ranchers who now work the land have told WSU that they’ve been doing their own prairie chicken surveys, he said. Some people don’t worry about the future of prairie chickens, but they do.

The family foundation of the estate of Earl and Terri Youngmeyer donated access to the land to WSU. The foundation will retain ownership. The land won’t be open to the public.

Part of what motivated the Youngmeyers to donate access, WSU officials said, was to preserve everything – not only the ranch but also how great it looks.

The possibilities of what WSU could learn there are exceeded only by what it might consider doing with what’s below ground there, said Rex Buchanan, the interim director of the Kansas Geological Survey.

The limestone and shale bedrock of the Flint Hills formed as a warm, shallow seabed 300 million to 250 million years ago, Buchanan said. Collectors and scientists like the abundant fossils they find there: brachiopods, corals, sponges and crinoids (sea lilies).

This was the Permian Period, long before dinosaurs. Only the most primitive of animals walked the Earth or swam the seas.

Erosion created the vast stair-step slopes after the seabed rose and dried out. Settlers, when they saw that their plows couldn’t bust up stone, left the Flint Hills grasses unplowed and ran cattle and horses on them instead. Ranchers still do that.

Underfoot in the hills, Buchanan said, are features important to the agricultural economy: fractures in huge formations of stone, where water gets stored, cooled and moved slowly about by gravity.

The Flint Hills have many natural springs where water comes flowing out clear and cold.

“One of the real attractions of a place like that for science would be studying the watersheds and movement of water, both on the surface and in the subsurface,” Buchanan said.

There’s much that could be learned there, Buchanan said, about how water moves through the hills and how that might change in drought or because of climate change.

“We haven’t even begun to assess everything we could do out here,” Houseman said. “But we can do a lot.

“And as you can see, it’s a beautiful place.”

This story was originally published October 9, 2014 at 7:01 AM with the headline "Flint Hills ranch offers vast research possibilities for WSU scientists."