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Maxwell Wildlife Refuge
The Maxwell Wildlife Refuge in McPherson County, Kansas consists of of mostly mixed grass prairie. Bison and elk inhabit the refuge. The McPherson State Fishing Lake adjoins the refuge and adds another of protected area, including a lake. History In 1859 an immigrant from Scotland, John Gault Maxwell (born 1825), settled in McPherson County. He helped to preserve the prairie and a remnant of the bison rapidly being extirpated from the Great Plains. In 1940, his son Henry willed $75,000 for the establishment of a refuge. In 1951, the Maxwell Wildlife Refuge was officially opened with a herd of 10 bison and 6 elk. A portion of the land was set aside for the construction of the McPherson County Fishing Lake."Maxwell Wildlife refuge, a Gleaming Jewel in the Kansas Crown", ''Rural Messenger'', http://www.ruralmessenger.com/kansas-news/outdoors/maxwell-wildlife-refuge-a-gleaming-jewel-in-the-kansas-crown/, accessed 5 Nov 2017 Description The refuge sits at the southern edge of the S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kansas
Kansas () is a state in the Midwestern United States. Its capital is Topeka, and its largest city is Wichita. Kansas is a landlocked state bordered by Nebraska to the north; Missouri to the east; Oklahoma to the south; and Colorado to the west. Kansas is named after the Kansas River, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native Americans who lived along its banks. The tribe's name (natively ') is often said to mean "people of the (south) wind" although this was probably not the term's original meaning. For thousands of years, what is now Kansas was home to numerous and diverse Native American tribes. Tribes in the eastern part of the state generally lived in villages along the river valleys. Tribes in the western part of the state were semi-nomadic and hunted large herds of bison. The first Euro-American settlement in Kansas occurred in 1827 at Fort Leavenworth. The pace of settlement accelerated in the 1850s, in the midst of political wars over the slavery debate. Wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Smoky Hills
The Smoky Hills are an upland region of hills in the central Great Plains of North America. They are located in the Midwestern United States, encompassing north-central Kansas and a small portion of south-central Nebraska. The hills are a dissected plain covered by tallgrass and mixed-grass prairie. The Smoky Hills were formed by erosion of sedimentary deposits from the Cretaceous period and expose chalk, limestone, and sandstone rock outcroppings. Geography The Smoky Hills region is part of the Plains Border subregion of the Great Plains. It occupies nearly all of north-central Kansas, bordered on the west by the High Plains, on the northeast by the Dissected Till Plains, on the east by the Flint Hills, and on the south by the Arkansas River lowlands. The region extends into south-central Nebraska, bordered on the north by the Rainwater Basin. It consists of three belts of hills, all running southwest to northeast, which correspond to the underlying geological formations (se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
White-tailed Deer
The white-tailed deer (''Odocoileus virginianus''), also known as the whitetail or Virginia deer, is a medium-sized deer native to North America, Central America, and South America as far south as Peru and Bolivia. It has also been introduced to New Zealand, all the Greater Antilles in the Caribbean (Cuba, Jamaica Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of His ..., Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico), and some countries in Europe, such as the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Romania and Serbia. In the Americas, it is the most widely distributed wild ungulate. In North America, the species is widely distributed east of the Rocky Mountains as well as in southwestern Arizona and most of Mexico, except Baja California peninsula, Lower California. It is mostly displaced by the black ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Beaver
Beavers are large, semiaquatic rodents in the genus ''Castor'' native to the temperate Northern Hemisphere. There are two extant species: the North American beaver (''Castor canadensis'') and the Eurasian beaver (''C. fiber''). Beavers are the second-largest living rodents after the capybaras. They have stout bodies with large heads, long chisel-like incisors, brown or gray fur, hand-like front feet, webbed back feet and flat, scaly tails. The two species differ in the shape of the skull and tail and fur color. Beavers can be found in a number of freshwater habitats, such as rivers, streams, lakes and ponds. They are herbivorous, consuming tree bark, aquatic plants, grasses and sedges. Beavers build dams and lodges using tree branches, vegetation, rocks and mud; they chew down trees for building material. Dams impound water and lodges serve as shelters. Their infrastructure creates wetlands used by many other species, and because of their effect on other organisms in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steppe
In physical geography, a steppe () is an ecoregion characterized by grassland plains without trees apart from those near rivers and lakes. Steppe biomes may include: * the montane grasslands and shrublands biome * the temperate grasslands, savannas and shrublands biome A steppe may be semi-arid or covered with grass or with shrubs or with both, depending on the season and latitude. The term " steppe climate" denotes the climate encountered in regions too dry to support a forest but not dry enough to be a desert. Steppe soils are typically of the chernozem type. Steppes are usually characterized by a semi-arid or continental climate. Extremes can be recorded in the summer of up to and in winter, . Besides this major seasonal difference, fluctuations between day and night are also very great. In both the highlands of Mongolia and northern Nevada, can be reached during the day with sub-freezing readings at night. Mid-latitude steppes feature hot summers and cold wint ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Short Grass Prairie
The shortgrass prairie is an ecosystem located in the Great Plains of North America. The two most dominant grasses in the shortgrass prairie are blue grama (''Bouteloua gracilis'') and buffalograss (''Bouteloua dactyloides''), the two less dominant grasses in the prairie are greasegrass (''Tridens flavus'') and sideoats grama (''Bouteloua curtipendula''). The prairie was formerly maintained by grazing pressure of American bison, which is the keystone species. Due to its semiarid climate, the shortgrass prairie receives on average less precipitation than that of the tall and mixed grass prairies to the east. The prairie includes lands to the west as far as the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains and extends east as far as Nebraska and north into Saskatchewan. The prairie stretches through parts of Alberta, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Kansas, and passes south through the high plains of Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. History The shortgr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tall Grass Prairie
The tallgrass prairie is an ecosystem native to central North America. Historically, natural and anthropogenic fire, as well as grazing by large mammals (primarily bison) provided periodic disturbances to these ecosystems, limiting the encroachment of trees, recycling soil nutrients, and facilitating seed dispersal and germination. Prior to widespread use of the steel plow, which enabled large scale conversion to agricultural land use, tallgrass prairies extended throughout the American Midwest and smaller portions of southern central Canada, from the transitional ecotones out of eastern North American forests, west to a climatic threshold based on precipitation and soils, to the southern reaches of the Flint Hills in Oklahoma, to a transition into forest in Manitoba. They were characteristically found in the central forest-grasslands transition, the central tall grasslands, the upper Midwest forest-savanna transition, and the northern tall grasslands ecoregions. They flour ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gypsum Creek
Gypsum Creek is a stream in Saline County, Kansas and McPherson County, Kansas, in the United States. Gypsum Creek is a tributary of the Smoky Hill River, runs south to north, and is approximately long. The Maxwell Wildlife Refuge, which has herds of bison and elk is located in the headwaters of the Creek in McPherson County. Gypsum Creek was likely named from reports of deposits of gypsum discovered on the Coronado expedition. See also *List of rivers of Kansas This is a list of rivers in Kansas (U.S. state). By drainage basin This list is arranged by drainage basin, with respective tributaries indented under each larger stream's name. Mississippi River Basin Arkansas River Basin *Arkansas River * ... References Rivers of McPherson County, Kansas Rivers of Saline County, Kansas Rivers of Kansas {{Kansas-river-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Great Plains
The Great Plains (french: Grandes Plaines), sometimes simply "the Plains", is a broad expanse of flatland in North America. It is located west of the Mississippi River and east of the Rocky Mountains, much of it covered in prairie, steppe, and grassland. It is the southern and main part of the Interior Plains, which also include the tallgrass prairie between the Great Lakes and Appalachian Plateau, and the Taiga Plains and Boreal Plains ecozones in Northern Canada. The term Western Plains is used to describe the ecoregion of the Great Plains, or alternatively the western portion of the Great Plains. The Great Plains lies across both Central United States and Western Canada, encompassing: * The entirety of the U.S. states of Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota; * Parts of the U.S. states of Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming; * The southern portions of the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
McPherson County, Kansas
McPherson County (standard abbreviation: MP) is a county located in the U.S. state of Kansas. As of the 2020 census, the county population was 30,223. The largest city and county seat is McPherson. The county is named for Civil War General James B. McPherson. History Early history For many millennia, the Great Plains of North America was inhabited by nomadic Native Americans. From the 16th century to 18th century, the Kingdom of France claimed ownership of large parts of North America. In 1762, after the French and Indian War, France secretly ceded New France to Spain, per the Treaty of Fontainebleau. In 1802, Spain returned most of the land to France, but keeping title to about 7,500 square miles. In 1803, most of the land for modern day Kansas was acquired by the United States from France as part of the 828,000 square mile Louisiana Purchase for 2.83 cents per acre. In 1848, after the Mexican–American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Spain brought into the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Local Extinction
Local extinction, also known as extirpation, refers to a species (or other taxon) of plant or animal that ceases to exist in a chosen geographic area of study, though it still exists elsewhere. Local extinctions are contrasted with global extinctions. Local extinctions mark a change in the ecology of an area. In recent times, local extinction has sometimes been followed by a replacement of the species taken from other locations; wolf reintroduction is an example of this. The term "local extinction" is highly vernacular. The more proper biological term is ''extirpation''. Discussion Glaciation can lead to local extinction. This was the case during the Pleistocene glaciation event in North America. During this period, most of the native North American species of earthworm were killed in places covered by glaciation. This left them open for colonization by European earthworms brought over in soil from Europe. Species naturally become extirpated from islands over time. The number ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bison
Bison are large bovines in the genus ''Bison'' (Greek: "wild ox" (bison)) within the tribe Bovini. Two extant and numerous extinct species are recognised. Of the two surviving species, the American bison, ''B. bison'', found only in North America, is the more numerous. Although colloquially referred to as a buffalo in the United States and Canada, it is only distantly related to the true buffalo. The North American species is composed of two subspecies, the Plains bison, ''B. b. bison'', and the wood bison, ''B. b. athabascae'', which is the namesake of Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada. A third subspecies, the eastern bison (''B. b. pennsylvanicus'') is no longer considered a valid taxon, being a junior synonym of ''B. b. bison''. References to "woods bison" or "wood bison" from the eastern United States refer to this subspecies, not ''B. b. athabascae'', which was not found in the region. The European bison, ''B. bonasus'', or wisent, or zubr, or colloquially European buff ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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