Ways to Get Involved
Whether you want to further conservation, learn more about nature or share your love of the outdoors, you’ve come to the right place. National wildlife refuges provide many opportunities for you to help your community and fish and wildlife by doing what you love. National wildlife refuges partner with volunteers, youth groups, landowners, neighbors, and residents of urban and coastal communities to make a lasting difference. Find out how you can help make American lands healthier and communities stronger while doing something personally satisfying.
Volunteers: Gain new experiences and meet new people while helping to advance wildlife conservation.
Friends: Join neighbors in helping refuges restore habitat and expand access to green space.
Landowners: Learn how you can partner with the Fish and Wildlife Service to voluntarily restore land.
Local Groups: Find out how communities can work with refuges better for wildlife and people.
Youth: Explore paid and unpaid opportunities to learn and develop leadership skills.
Our Partners
Nature does not recognize human-made boundaries. In order to conserve our natural and cultural resources effectively, we must work with others to bridge these boundaries. Partnerships foster creative solutions to challenging situations and often the results are greater than the sum of the parts.
Partners for Fish & Wildlife
The North Platte River in western Nebraska is one of the state’s most biologically diverse systems and as such is a conservation focus area for the Nebraska Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program. The focus area extends from western Scotts Bluff County running eastward 180 miles to central Lincoln County. The wet meadows, freshwater and alkaline wetlands, river channels, sloughs, sandbars and islands, and other associated habitats provide invaluable areas for migrating, wintering, and breeding waterbirds, grassland nesting birds, three threatened and endangered species (whooping crane, least tern, and piping plover), and countless other species of wildlife. Over 225 migratory bird species have been documented using the habitats found in the focus area in addition to millions of ducks, hundreds of thousands of geese, and tens of thousands of sandhill cranes.
Changes in the historic ecological forces that once shaped the North Platte River corridor have resulted in a degradation of grassland, wetland, and riparian riparian
Definition of riparian habitat or riparian areas.
Learn more about riparian habitats. These changes include depletion of water flows, loss of periodic flooding events, invasive plant species, and a loss of historic disturbances such as seasonal wildfires and grazing by large herbivores. The Nebraska Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program works with private landowners to restore wetland and grassland habitats in the focus area by (1) removing invasive woody and herbaceous vegetation (i.e. Russian olive and phragmites); (2) mechanically removing invasive and undesirable vegetation, silt, and sediment from backwater sloughs and wetlands; (3) managing hydrology through the installation of water control structures and other water level management systems; (4) developing haying and grazing management systems to promote both grassland health and economic viability; and (5) reestablishing native prairie in converted habitats.
The success of the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program in western Nebraska lies in the strong relationships with private landowners and conservation partners. In cooperation with the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission; Nebraska Environmental Trust; Platte River Basin Environments, Inc.; Ducks Unlimited; Natural Resources Conservation Service; The Nature Conservancy; Pheasants Forever; and numerous other partners, the Service has completed over 119 restoration projects along the North Platte River to the improvement of over 15,000 acres of habitat, 23 miles of river channel, and 56 miles of wetland sloughs and backwaters.