What if one of the best ways to protect nature is to treat the land like a classroom? In 2021, Ted Turner created exactly that kind of place. He transferred almost 80,000 acres of prairie land to the Turner Institute of Ecoagriculture, which became a laboratory for wetlands and bison. One of the projects of this institute focuses on wet meadows located between the sand dunes of Nebraska. According to the Turner Institute of Ecoagriculture, these waterlogged areas are more important than they seem.
From private ranch to research hub
McGinley Ranch sits in the northern Sandhills of Nebraska and straddles the border with South Dakota. The ranch occupied roughly 79,000 acres of native range when Turner’s firm moved it to the nonprofit organization in July 2021. The institute’s first research partner was the Center of Excellence for Bison Studies at South Dakota State University. The institute said it could qualify for a property tax exemption but had no intention of applying for it, easing neighbors’ worries that the land would leave the tax rolls. Its goal was to raise bison and generate income from grazing while maintaining ecosystem health.
Why wet meadows matter
The same page explains that wetlands of all sorts occupy about 10% of the land in the Sandhills. These include wet meadows, shallow lakes, and fens. They provide flood regulation, water storage and purification, carbon storage, and habitat for plants and animals. It also estimates that the area may have lost up to 46% of its wetlands since the beginning of the twentieth century. Most of this loss was due to the drainage of land by means of ditches. Ditches alter water movement and can allow nonnative plants to move in. That’s why the institute says it wants to restore wet meadows where it makes sense.
What the soil tests showed
The page also shares results and cites a 2025 master’s thesis by Nathan Moore, a graduate student at Oklahoma State University. The study analyzed 620 soil samples from paired sites on two ranches in Cherry County, Nebraska. The wet meadow soil held substantially more organic carbon than the dunes. Organic carbon made up an average of 2.95% of wet meadow soil, compared with 0.45% in the dunes. Soil texture was the main driver of the gap, since sandy soil stored less carbon. Future research, the institute adds, should test whether restoring water flow would help wet meadows sequester more carbon.
What bison add to the picture
The bison are the other side of the equation. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022 about the bison of a tallgrass prairie in Kansas was led by Zak Ratajczak of Kansas State University. The authors reported that, compared with ungrazed areas, reintroducing bison increased native plant species richness (the number of native plant species) by 103% at the local scale of 10 square meters. At the larger catchment scale, the increase was 86%. The comparison is between bison grazing and no grazing at all. These results held for 29 years, and the bison-grazed plots proved resilient to the most extreme drought in four decades, recovering within two to four years. However, a Kansas prairie is different from the Sandhills, so these statistics cannot be directly applied to Turner’s property.
A legacy in the grass
Turner passed away on May 6, 2026, at 87 years old. The land that Turner moved into the institute in 2021 became a testing ground for ideas about water, soil, and grazing. The Nebraska soil test and the Kansas bison study come from separate locations and raise separate questions, and therefore, each only contributes a part of the picture. However, together they show how a working ranch can also be a learning lab for people studying wetlands and bison.