Kelly Kindscher

Plant Ecologist and Ethnobotanist, Kansas Biological Survey & Center for Ecological Research

2024 George B. Fell Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient

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.

Linda Lehrbaum

Program Manager, Kansas City WildLands (Retired) 

2024 Carl N. Becker Stewardship Award Recipient

Before her retirement in late 2023, Linda Lehrbaum coordinated a large and diverse pool of volunteers and workdays for more than 20 years through her work with Kansas City WildLands. Lehrbaum also managed a coalition of partner organizations, which included conservation NGOs, city, county, and state agencies, and local universities.

She lobbied partner organizations for funding and support, promoted the organization, and personally performed land-management activities, including invasive species eradication and prescribed burning.

Lehrbaum's creativity yielded a lasting legacy of conservation through programs like an early native seed collection program and an eastern red cedar Christmas tree harvest program, both novel ideas 15 years ago. Her persistence pushed the Johnson County Park and Recreation District and other county and city governments on both sides of the state line to take natural resource management seriously and supported the development of a national award-winning conservation program. 

She has shared extensive information on Kansas City WildLands restoration efforts at the local, state, and national levels, ensuring others could learn from the model she helped to build. 

2024 Student Award Recipients

Graduate Poster

• 2^nd place Reb Bryant, University of Kansas, Remnant prairie patches promote biodiversity and succession across different aggregate sizes and land use histories
• 1^st place Isabella Petitta, Pennsylvania State University, Effect of prescribed burning and deer exclusion fencing on wild lupine (Lupinus perennis L.) and associated pollinators

Undergraduate Poster:

• 2^nd place Klara Stevermer, Kansas State University Division of Biology, Aquatic dynamics in bison wallows and ephemeral streams
• 1^st place Kendall Hays, Oklahoma State University, Inorganic Fertilizers and the Role of Phosphorus and Potassium in Native Prairie Restoration

Graduate Oral

• 2^nd place Bret Lang, South Dakota State University, Intra- and Inter-annual Changes in Soil Health with Native Plant Monocultures
• 1^st place Hannah Dea, Kansas State University, Post-agricultural prairie soil microbial community resilience across the steep precipitation gradient in Kansas, USA.