NAA presents its annual awards to honor those who have made, and are making, extraordinary contributions to the stewardship of ecologically diverse land and water scapes.
Natural Areas Association (NAA) will honor its 2024 award recipients, Kelly Kindscher and Linda Lehrbaum, during an award ceremony on Thursday, October 10, 2024, during the 2024 Natural Areas Conference (NAC24): Where Science Meets Stewardship in Manhattan, Kansas. This is your chance to celebrate with your colleagues! You can attend the award ceremony in one of three ways:
2024 George B. Fell Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient
Plant Ecologist and Ethnobotanist, University of Kansas
Kelly Kindscher is best known as a passionate advocate for native plants, native landscapes and wild places. His research is focused on ethnobotany, native plants, native prairies, prairie and wetland restoration and regional plant communities. He is a conservationist, teacher, mentor, professional wetland scientist, and environmental problem solver. He is an author of books on edible and medicinal plants and has published over 130 publications.
He was born in Syracuse, Kansas, and grew up in Newton, Kansas, and on his family’s homesteaded farm near Guide Rock, Nebraska. It was on the farm that he was first exposed to and learned about the prairie plants growing on the family’s native prairie used for pasture.
College took him to the University of Kansas, which has become his professional home. He graduated with honors in the Environmental Studies Program in 1979. In 1983, he and a friend, took a summer jaunt to explore the Prairie Bioregion, starting from the junction of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers (known as Kansas City today) and hiked west following county roads, old trails and going cross-country in big landscapes over the next 79 days until reaching the Rocky Mountains southwest of Denver. This trip had a profound impact on his love of plants and prairies and led to him writing his first book, Edible Wild Plants of the Prairie, published in 1987. He went to graduate school and wrote his second book Medicinal Wild Plants of the Prairie as his master’s thesis and then earned a Ph.D. at the University of Kansas in 1991, in Systematics and Ecology, examining the groupings and importance of plant guilds in tallgrass prairie ecosystems.
He took a position at the Kansas Biological Survey, and his work at KU has evolved over the years. He is now a senior scientist at the Kansas Biological Survey, which is his research home, and a professor in the Environmental Studies Program, where he mentors students, and teaches Ethnobotany and the program’s senior Capstone course. He is currently working with the Arikara and Osage tribal nations on ethnobotany projects, with the US Forest Service on developing restoration projects in the Midwest, expanding the USDA NRCS database to include more ethnobotany, and continues to study Echinacea and other medicinal plants.
Finally, he is one of the founders of the Kansas Land Trust and a current board member and is involved in other non-profit, environmental, and community groups. He lives near Lawrence, Kansas, where he is an active gardener and enjoys growing vegetables, fruits, pollinator plants, and propagating native plants and fruit trees.
2024 Carl N. Becker Stewardship Award Recipient
Program Manager, Kansas City WildLands (Retired)
Before her retirement in late 2023, Linda Lehrbaum had been the program manager for Kansas City WildLands (KCWL) since its start with Bridging The Gap in 2002. During the last 21 years, Lehrbaum coordinated the first BioBlitzes in the Midwest, led and educated thousands of volunteers in hands-on land restoration, and coordinated with KCWL's partner organizations and land managers in the conservation and restoration of public remnant wild places. Lehrbaum has shared extensive information on KCWL restoration efforts on local, state, and national levels.
Join the people who protect and manage our natural areas.