Over a thousand endangered species live across the U.S., impacting many animals, plants, insects, and the groups working to protect them.
According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, there are more than 1,300 species listed as threatened or endangered in the Endangered Species Act. Nebraska is home to many different endangered species, one of which is the Salt Creek tiger beetle. This species of beetle only lives in Nebraska.
“I work with specifically the Salt Creek tiger beetle,” Nebraska Game and Parks Natural Heritage Program Zoologist Shaun Dunn said. “It’s found only here in Nebraska, and it’s found specifically in the saline wetlands around Lincoln…it’s one of the most rare insects in the world because its habitat is so small and found only around that area.”
Organizations like the state parks work to conserve these species in many different ways. At the state park level, one thing they do is species recovery plans, which work to get species off the endangered species list. They also do research.
“That typically means that we’re looking at: how do we improve habitat for it? Do we need to learn something more about the species? And that’s [the] research side of it,” Dunn said. “It could be habitat management for, okay, let’s improve the quality of the habitat so they have more area to live in.”
It’s not just animals and insects that are threatened with extinction; plants make up part of the number of endangered species, too. Some places like Lauritzen Gardens work to conserve plants. While Lauritzen Gardens does not work with federally threatened and endangered species, they work with many different rare and declining species across the state.
“What we’re finding in kind of current research is that these rare plants have… specific jobs within their communities,” Lauritzen Gardens Director of Conservation Katharine Hogan said. “So, in other words, usually these rare plants, they support pollinators that none of the other plants can, or they provide very specific nutrients in their nectar for pollinators or they kind of are a host plant for other species.”
Working in plant conservation entails a lot of different tasks. One thing Hogan is in charge of is deciding which plant species in Nebraska need conservation intervention, and part of her job is surveying the amount of a rare species found in an area.
“I am constantly reviewing the status of our native plants kind of in the area, in the region, and deciding which ones are most in danger of either local extinctions…or complete extinction,” Hogan said. “There’s over 1,500 species of vascular plants that have been documented in Nebraska, and probably about a quarter of them are declining to some degree. So it’s kind of my job to prioritize which species are most in need of conservation action, which ones we can most feasibly work with.”
Some people might have fear when it comes to endangered species and how to protect them, especially if endangered species live on their land. Dunn says he does a lot of work on private lands in collaboration with landowners, but biologists cannot just come on to landowner’s property and do whatever they want. Biologists also work with people in land development projects.
“When somebody, let’s say, wants to put a building in an area where there might be endangered species, they send their plans to us,” Dunn said. “We look those over, make sure that they’re okay, and we have a whole group of biologists that do that.”
The biologists, more specifically workers in the heritage section, also study endangered species and do a lot of field work. Each state in the U.S. has a heritage section, and so does Canada. Their goal is to collect high quality data on the species in each of their respective states and areas.
“So we try to collect those data to keep track of those species,” Dunn said. “And then all of those data from all the various heritage programs basically are put together into one program that can be accessed by, let’s say, Congress is looking at potentially listing a new endangered species. So they will use those data to look at, okay, how are the numbers doing across the various states?”
Public cooperation and interest plays a role in plant and animal conservation. There are many different things, large and small, that people can do to help out these rare and endangered species.
“If you’re planting plants for landscaping, planting native plants is a really great way to start,” Hogan said. “And that’s something you can do if you have a tenth of an acre, like city lot, or if you have hundreds of acres on a ranch, that’s something that just about anyone can do, even if you’ve got an apartment and you put some native flowers in a planter out on your balcony, really, anything helps.”
There are also organizations within the local Bellevue community concerned with the environment, such as Green Bellevue. An option at school is Green Initiative, a club focused on the environment that does work in the community, such as roadside cleanups.
“I’m interested in endangered species because I really care about the environment, and I think that ecosystems, like regulating them, is very important, and I think it’s one of the main purposes of being a human,” Green Initiative member senior Lillian Hagan said.
