OSU Professors Receive $5 million Grant to Study Imperiled Plants

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A $5.5 million grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is going to two Oklahoma State University professors of integrative biology to study ways to protect imperiled species.

Kristen Baum and Monica Papes will work with a researcher at the University of Texas in Austin on a 3-year project on pollinator habitation restoration in Oklahoma and Texas grassland.

“I think we can make the biggest difference by encouraging the use of prescribed fire and native plants to support pollinator habitat,” said Baum. She explained site selection of the lands is the first step in the process and will involve assistance from the Oklahoma Tribes Monarch Habitation Project and the Gulf Coast Prairie Landscape Conservation Cooperative.

Once the sites are chosen, habitat restoration efforts will include prescribed fire and seeding with nectar pollen plants and host plants such as milkweed.  They will be monitored and evaluated.

A spokesman for the USFWS’s competitive State Wildlife Grant program says it will help safeguard some of the country’s most at-risk species.