Two Centuries After Lewis and Clark, Boone County Wildlife Gets a Checkup

More than 220 years after Meriwether Lewis and William Clark logged what they saw along the Missouri River, a University of Missouri research team has been quietly checking their work — with trail cameras standing in for journal entries, and the Smithsonian Institution as a partner.

The project is part of a nationwide effort — roughly 130 research teams working across 18 states — to resurvey wildlife along the length of the Lewis and Clark Trail and see how animal communities have shifted since the expedition passed through in the early 1800s. The local piece of it played out much closer to home than most readers might guess: motion-activated cameras at Mizzou’s Baskett Forest, a research and education center about five miles east of Ashland in southern Boone County, deployed starting in June for two-month stretches.

Mizzou professor Christine Brodsky, who led the local fieldwork, said the point is partly to see what’s filled the gaps left by species the expedition would have encountered but modern Missourians won’t — bison and gray wolves chief among them — and partly to see what’s moved in to take their place. Her team’s cameras turned up eight mammal species, including coyotes, white-tailed deer and squirrels, and eight bird species. Notably, several of the animals photographed were juveniles — a small but encouraging sign of populations healthy enough to be reproducing successfully in the area.

Brigit Rooney, the Smithsonian’s coordinator on the project, has described the work as setting today’s wildlife data directly against the observations Lewis and Clark’s party wrote down two centuries ago — a rare chance to measure ecological change against a primary source that old. The Smithsonian also funded 15 students from nine tribal colleges to take part in the fieldwork, a nod to the expedition’s history with the Native nations whose homelands it passed through.

It’s an unglamorous kind of good news — nobody cut a ribbon, and there’s no grant total to report — but it’s the kind of milestone worth noting anyway: a two-century-old question about our own stretch of the river’s country finally getting a real, camera-documented answer, with a Boone County forest as one of the data points. As graduate research assistant Adar Reed put it, this is exactly the sort of work researchers “should share…more often.”

Baskett Forest has been a University of Missouri teaching and research property since 1939; the wildlife survey there is one small piece of a much larger picture researchers are assembling of how 220 years have reshaped the country Lewis and Clark once mapped by canoe and on foot — including the stretch of it right past Rocheport.