At a stock tank in the Sandhills, cattle come and go. A windmill turns furiously. Fall arrives, and the tank goes dry. Snow and ice accumulate. Spring comes, and the grass greens. A rancher turns the cows and calves loose in the pasture. The cycle repeats. An oxbow in a Sandhills river continually cuts backward, the river’s fragile banks eroding with the water’s flow. Birds arrive, nest, fledge their young, and leave a Sandhills lake as the four seasons progress. Ranchers move cattle about on meadows to take advantage of new grass and to allow pastures to recover. These meadows, marshes, and wetlands are critical pieces of the Sandhills ecosystem responding to climate, weather, and people. Small daily changes, nearly imperceptible, mount up over seasons and years. What if you could see a decade of seasonal change in thirty seconds? Would it change how you interpret the Sandhills and its ecosystems?
Over a dozen time-lapse cameras dot the Nebraska Sandhills, documenting the daily events of the landscapes, animals, and waters. It may seem like a static, unchanging region of grass, water, and sky, but the cameras tell the story of a robust ecosystem as it adjusts to weather, animals, people, and the progression of time.
The cameras are part of Platte Basin Timelapse (PBT), a long-term project that seeks to uplift and describe the natural and human-influenced processes of a river system that traverses three states. PBT presents a vision of a watershed as a set of motion picture images, capturing the river and adjoining land as they unfold over time from multiple viewpoints. The largest river system in the Sandhills, the Loup, is among the Platte’s major tributaries, and much of its flow is from the aquifer system beneath.
Since 2011 PBT cameras have been collecting images from over sixty points throughout the Platte River Basin, from the high country of the river’s sources in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Wyoming and eastward through Nebraska, where the river is fed by tributaries that traverse the Sandhills, to its confluence with the Missouri River south of Omaha. Cameras record an image once an hour each hour of daylight. Those images are collated into time-lapse motion pictures that show the river and its watershed unfolding in ways that compress and intensify the normal human perception of time.
When the many camera positions and viewsheds are assembled into collections of interrelated movies, questions arise, and stories emerge. The river as a process of nature wants to be one thing; through technology and engineering, humans urge it to be something else. These conflicting tendencies are the essence of the stories PBT producers tell.
Platte Basin Timelapse co-founder Michael Farrell notes that people who see the river every day, or even infrequently, often are only vaguely aware of seasonal changes. But if those seasonal changes are captured and compressed into films, the reality of change becomes apparent. The rapid compilation of years of images into a short film causes the viewer’s perceptions to both speed up and slow down as they observe the passage of the river and time.
“The hundreds of camera images can show you the cycle of the seasons over several years in a matter of minutes,” Farrell said. “The subtleties of dry versus wet years are made manifest to those who take the time to look to see the differences.”
Farrell and PBT co-founder Michael Forsberg conceived the project during conversations they had while working together on a film about the Great Plains, based on a book by Forsberg. Farrell, then a filmmaker at Nebraska Public Media, and Forsberg, a freelance conservation photographer and author, both had vast experience telling the stories of the river.
After securing funding, Platte Basin Timelapse was launched and based at Nebraska Public Media. Later PBT moved its administrative offices to the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and in 2019 PBT became an entity within the School of Natural Resources at UNL’s Institute ofAgriculture and Natural Resources.
A stable of producers, photographers, filmmakers, scientists, graduate students, and undergraduate interns have produced web-based multimedia, films, and other creative works and have used images to support research and communication about a myriad of topics. Subjects include American dippers, sandhill cranes, trumpeter swans, fire suppression in the Wildcat Hills and Sandhills, bighorn sheep reintroduction, beavers and otters, prairies and their restoration, and the state’s wetlands, including those in the Sandhills. The latter is part of a large grant-funded project undertaken with Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. Platte Basin Timelapse’s images and stories inform a large educational outreach project for Game and Parks.
Much of science is the study of change and its impacts—looking at what changes over time, how events prompt changes, how organisms and ecosystems respond and react to stimuli. Before and after images can give a snapshot of one point in time. Time-lapse films, however, show change while it is occurring. These kinds of images are invaluable to scientists, such as PBT member Mary Harner, an associate professor of communication and biology at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Harner, her students, and colleagues have used PBT cameras and techniques to study the Sandhills and the Platte River in Nebraska; she also has applied these techniques to investigate the Rio Grande and Gila Rivers in New Mexico.
“Time-lapse images and the story-telling approach of PBT help advance both scientific research and public communication about natural resources,” explains Harner. “Images provide a way to connect people with the beauty of places—like wetlands in the Sandhills—and to portray complex processes and change unfolding across time. PBT also offers ways for students to use and learn from images, by placing cameras in places they seek to know more about and analyzing existing image libraries to catalog biodiversity and ecosystem change.”
The research aspects of PBT stand alongside the value it offers to lay audiences, Farrell said. “It is not a huge leap of imagination when viewing the timelapses of the Platte River to begin to reflect on the evolution of this watershed,” Farrell said. “How did this river come about to begin with? What forces were at work to lift the mountains and carve the canyons, deposit the sands and gravels? How has this work of nature evolved prior to any human awareness of its existence?”
For Forsberg, Platte Basin Timelapse has created community by connecting the river, the land, the wildlife, and the people. “Everyone on the planet lives in a watershed making all of us neighbors upstream and downstream of someone else,” Forsberg said. “That recognition is important. The old adage ‘Whiskey’s for drinking and water’s for fighting’ has proved out over history, and life has suffered. But understanding that we are all stewards of this most precious resource and have responsibility to each other levels the playing field and brings us together in a shared community we all belong to. I firmly believe that the role of water in our future can build community rather than tear communities apart. But first we have to know it. Then we have to love it.”
As some debate the reality of climate change, PBT cameras portray change in undeniable visual ways that human perception can easily miss, gloss over, or choose to ignore. Farrell views the project as a Trojan horse, in which viewers are drawn first to the images, which then unlock the doors of perception, to allow and entice viewers into a new way of perceiving the river.
“When we began the Platte Basin Timelapse, one goal was to help people understand the complexities behind the seemingly simple question, ‘Where does your water come from?’” Farrell said. “As time has passed, the cameras have observed and recorded the ongoing impacts of climate change, urban growth, and agricultural expansion. As these continue and as we hear talk of aquifer pumping and learn of new pipeline plans, we might now begin to ask, ‘Where will your water come from?’”