These researchers can’t be from Kansas. They are probably from the U.N!
If you ranch cattle you kill off the prairie dogs or your livestock will step into prairie dog burrows and break their legs. (For east coast folk, if your steer’s leg is broken you can’t walk them to the trailer to take them to the feed lot and they become coyote and vulture food, or, if they are someplace accessible and still alive, you shoot them and load them into a truck and sell them to a plant that makes dog food, but either way, you lose money...)
Anyway, one of the things that prairie dogs do is clear any shrubs OR TREES from the area around its burrow, which encourages the grass, which they eat and which does not grow well in shade. Trees and shrubs also provide cover for coyotes and a high perch for birds of prey to use while they enjoy the shade and select their next meal of prairie dog.
We killed the prairie dogs and that is at least one reasons why the trees are invading the prairie lands. If liberals are really concerned they should stop selling carbon waivers and start buying brush hogs! Yes, I know that there was a liberal movement to take over the high plains to create a buffalo commons. (And drive out all the conservatives.)
Yet buffalo like prarie dogs and get along well with them.