Kansas is the home of 21 endangered species and another 29 that are threatened.

The world has more than 7,000 endangered species, and the United States designates a species as threatened or endangered if the following occurs:

• Its habitat or range is threatened with destruction, modification or curtailment.
• It is overutilized for commercial, recreational, scientific or educational purposes.
• It is diseased or overly predated.
• Existing regulatory mechanisms to protect the animal are inadequate.
• If natural or manmade factors are affecting a species’ continued existence.

In Kansas, there are more than 20,000 species, and some may be listed as endangered due to the rarity of an animal’s specialized adaption or to an imminent threat to the species continued existence.

Kansas’s endangered mammals

There are only two endangered mammals in Kansas. The black-footed ferret lived throughout central and western Kansas and have typically lived alongside prairie dogs, which make up about 90% of its diet.

The Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks points to conversion of its habitat to rangeland and the poisoning of prairie dogs. The black-footed ferret was declared extinct in 1979, but later surveys discovered wild populations. It’s now believed there are about 200 mature black-footed ferret in the wild across 18 populations.

The gray bat is a species of microbat with a habitat in Kansas carving out a sliver of the Ozark Plateau in the southeastern corner of the state. Though the bat is “almost totally cave dwelling,” according to the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks, its only known population in Kansas is a series of storm sewers in the southeast corner of the state.

Kansas’s endangered birds

The least tern is a small migratory bird that can be found throughout Kansas during migratory periods in the summer. Of three subspecies of least terns, two are considered endangered.

The largest American bird, the whooping crane, has historical habitat in south-central Kansas, where it generally passed through during migratory periods in spring and fall. The species declined due to unregulated hunting and habitat loss, it rebounded from a low of just 21 wild whooping cranes in 1941 to about 800 birds today.

Kansas’s endangered fish

The pallid sturgeon can get as large as five feet long, and usually reside in main channels of large turbid rivers where currents are swift. The fish was common during the 20th century, but it’s believed habitat loss dwindled the numbers with the channeling and damming of the Missouri River.

Three species of chub are considered endangered:

• Peppered chub.
• Sicklefin chub.
• Silver Chub.

The 2.5-inch peppered chub is found in the lower Arkansas River and its major tributaries, but due to the dewatering of western Kansas streams, it’s now limited to lower portions of the river’s basin in Kansas.

The sicklefin chub is found in the Missouri River in the northeast portion of the state, favoring areas with a strong current.

The silver chub used to be common in the Kansas and Missouri rivers, but the University of Kansas Museum of Natural History hasn’t documented a specimen in the Kansas River since 1980.

The Arkansas River Shiner was formerly common in the Arkansas River but is reliant on flood flows and has fared poorly with reduced streamflow.

Kansas endangered amphibians

The spotted cave salamander, like the gray bat, is only present in a small sliver of the Ozark Plateau in southeast Kansas. It lives in pitch-black caves or near cold springs in the forest. The second edition “Pocket Guide to Kansas Threatened and Endangered Species” says the salamander is a “unique component of Kansas natural heritage” because the habitat itself is uncommon in Kansas.

The grotto salamander resides in the same region as the spotted cave salamander in southeast Kansas. They are blind cave-dwelling salamander that grow up to 5 inches long.

Kansas’s endangered invertebrates

Of the 11 endangered invertebrates in Kansas, eight are mussels:

• Elktoe mussel.
• Ellipse mussel.
• Flat floater mussel.
• Mucket Mussel.
• Neosho mucket mussel.
• Rabbitsfoot mussel.
• Western fanshell mussel.
• Cylindrical papershell mussel.

  There are also two endangered species of beetle in the state, with the American burying beetle losing ground in the eastern third of the state and the Scott optioservus riffle beetle only known to reside in Scott State Park in Scott County.

  The slender walker snail has one isolated population in northeast Kansas wetlands. The U.S. government doesn’t consider them endangered, but Kansas does.

  As reported in the Topeka Capital Journal

National Science Foundation awards $2M for innovative project.

Kansas State University researchers have received a $2 million award from the National Science Foundation’s Global Centers program to develop sensors that can more accurately detect nutrients, chemical compounds, soil microbiomes and greenhouse gases in soil.

Suprem Das, an associate professor in K-State’s Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, said advancing soil sensors –and allowing farmers to collect soil information in real time – “is essential for advancing precision agriculture and promoting sustainable practices.”

Das will lead the project of more than a half dozen scientists aiming to develop sensors using atomically thin carbon sheets in which the actual sensing events occur at the nanoscale, defined as a dimension between 1 and 100 nanometers.

To visualize the nanoscale, consider that a single strand of human hair is approximately 80,000 to 100,000 nanometers wide; a sheet of standard copy paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick.

“When you make things smaller and smaller and eventually go to a nanoscale, you can fundamentally see different properties of those things you are measuring,” Das said. “We are able to exploit some of those properties to make these sensors so they can better measure the properties we’re after.”

Raj Khosla, head of K-State’s Department of Agronomy, notes that researchers think that employing sensors at a nanoscale may help them more accurately and more quickly measure nitrogen in farm fields.

Nitrogen is a vital nutrient in agriculture, enabling crops to capture sunlight energy through photosynthesis, and thus increase growth and yield.

“The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s innovation agenda says that by 2050, our country will reduce our nitrogen consumption by 50%,” Khosla said.

“But before we can think of reducing nitrogen waste in farm fields, we need to be able to measure how much of it is in the plant and soil,” he said. “The soil sensors we will be developing will allow us to measure rates of nitrates in soil instantly, and eventually we’ll work on measuring the rates of nitrogen in plants throughout the field.”

According to the U.S. Government’s National Nanotechnology Initiative, nanostructured materials are stronger and possess transformative physical properties that often make them better at conducting electricity and heat; are strong in mechanical strength; and are suitable for chemical detection, among other desired qualities.

In 2022, Khosla and a team of K-State agronomy researchers announced that they were working on a biodegradable soil sensor – roughly the size of a postage stamp – that could measure soil properties of a farm field so that in a matter of seconds, farmers could adjust water, nitrogen and other inputs to abundantly grow crops.

“In talking with Suprem, he told me, ‘well, you’re doing this at a micro scale; we can do it at a nanoscale,’” Khosla said. “So I was very excited. My emphasis is to create the ability to collect data at a high spatial density so that – for example, you’ve heard of No Child Left Behind – well, I have a policy that no corner of the farm field should be left behind.”

“I am focused heavily on agriculture and agricultural applications. Suprem and his team are focused on nanoscale materials, physics and engineering. I couldn’t have thought of a better team to come together.”

Khosla notes that on-farm use of nanoscale soil sensors is several years away, “but unless we start working now, it’s not going to happen.”

The K-State team includes experts in chemistry and chemical engineering, data science, omics (a field of biological study that analyzes the structure and function of an organism’s biomolecules and molecular processes), microbiology and metabolic engineering. Das said the project also is focused on technology development and commercialization, involving a team from K-State’s College of Business Administration.

The initial research and testing of the nanoscale sensors will take place on K-State’s North Farm in Manhattan, but Das said it will eventually spread to sites in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Das also anticipates forming a Global Center to help train students in interdisciplinary research and education and increase understanding of the capability of the proposed sensors.

“When we think of these sensors, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ they will be developed; it’s a matter of ‘when’ they will be developed,” Das said. “And we’re a lot closer today than we ever have been before.”

He notes the variety of researchers with varied expertise on the team: “Our challenge will be to develop very robust algorithms to be able to translate millions of data points from these sensors, then process them, analyze them, store them and derive decisions in near real time for farmers to use.”

The project, Das said, is the first successful example of leveraging K-State’s GRIP (game-changing research initiation program) award to attract highly competitive federal grants.

Funding for K-State’s work begins on Jan. 1, 2025.