Research Programs
The Center welcomes visiting scholars whose research focuses at least in part on Great Plains subjects.
J. Dixon Esseks, Emeritus Professor of Public Administration from Northern Illinois University, conducted two funded projects at the Center.
A USDA Forest Service project (September 2004 through June 2005) is surveying over 1,200 clients of the Service’s Forest Stewardship Program. This program provides assistance to state forestry agencies in developing forest management plans for private owners of non-industrial-size forestland holdings. Among the questions asked in the survey are: whether the owners found the plans to have been clearly written, if they have begun to implement the management practices recommended in the plans, whether any follow-up technical assistance or cost-sharing money was obtained, and did either kind of aid make a difference in the decisions to implement plans. For this project, two graduate students and one undergraduate have been employed. View the Final Report
The second project (September 2004 through August 2006) is funded by the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service. This project focuses on how (if at all) a viable agricultural sector can survive when a once-important agricultural county urbanizes. Fifteen counties across the nation are being studied through telephone interviews of leaders of agriculture and local government and via surveys of farmland owners. Relevant documents like land-use plans, zoning ordinances, and economic development studies are being collected. Lancaster County, Nebraska, is one of the studied counties. Three graduate students are working with Dick Esseks on this project. View the Final Report
Project Director — J. Dixon Esseks
Forest Service Graduate Research Assistants — Beth Moorhouse, Jill
Mulligan
Forest Service Undergraduate Research Assistant — Mary Kate McCarney
Farm Viability Project — John Seward, Jessica Nelson, Monica Stroe
Dr. Richard (Rick) Edwards returned to the faculty in the Economics Department and affiliated with the Center after serving for nearly seven years as UNL’s Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. He has initiated a new research project focusing on economic and social change in the Great Plains, looking at the economics, demography, history, and natural resources (especially water) of the region. The region is undergoing extensive population movement, rural de-population, drought, and changes in international agricultural marketing, and it has high rates of reported poverty; as a consequence, the people and institutions in some areas of the Great Plains are under considerable stress.
Rick is also working with the Homestead National Monument in Beatrice, Neb., and the UNL Libraries to create a microfilm and electronic archive in Beatrice (and Lincoln) of the nation’s homesteading land records. The current paper archive, housed in the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., contains some 30 million records. The purpose of the project is to enhance public access and ensure preservation of the records; the team of which he is a part has obtained some small grants ($45k) to support a pilot project involving the records of the Broken Bow (Neb.) land office.
