Q&A with Tony Capizzo: Flint Hills Initiative Director 

Meet Tony Capizzo

Flint Hills Initiative Director Tony Capizzo’s career at TNC has spanned nearly fifteen years. During that time, he’s led science backed and community focused efforts to protect biodiversity in the Flint Hills of Kansas and Oklahoma. We recently sat down with Tony for a wide-ranging discussion covering partnerships, progress to date, and goals for the future of the region.

Can you provide an overview of the region encompassing the Flint Hills?  

Historically, the region was comprised of 170 million acres of tallgrass prairie. The Flint Hills are a mix of western prairie that meets the eastern forested systems of North America, and the lands have been home to herbivory species like bison, elk and pronghorn among other wildlife like the greater prairie chicken. Less than 4% of those original 170 million acres remain today, with 2% of that land in the Flint Hills.  

What is unique about the region today?   

Today, most of those original 170 million acres of tallgrass prairie have become row crop agriculture. The Flint Hills are important because there’s so much prairie here and because of the connected north-to-south corridor. Resident wildlife needs that habitat. It’s also critical for a lot of different migratory species. When we look at different migratory species, shorebird biologists estimate 73% of the global population of buff-breasted sandpipers migrate through the Flint Hills every year. For American golden plovers, over 40% migrate through the Flint Hills. Monarch butterflies from the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve have also been found in two different preserves in Mexico. It reaffirms that this is an important north-south migratory corridor. 

Kansas is second in the nation for the greatest amount of privately owned land, and most of the Flint Hills are privately owned. That means individual decisions by land managers and landowners are maintaining this landscape.  We have maintained the majority of the biodiversity that was in the Flint Hills here originally. That comes back to land management decisions that current practitioners are making. The historic processes are still there. Fire today looks different than it did historically when it was being managed by Indigenous communities. But these processes continue to shape the community and landscape in the Flint Hills.  

What are the key priorities of the Flint Hills Initiative in 2025 and beyond?  

Our goals roll into one of three buckets. The first one is continued land protection working with landowners. The second is conservation habitat management practices. And the third bucket is renewable energy deployment and sighting. 

The goal of the Flint Hills Initiative is to maintain resilient, biologically diverse and ecologically functioning tallgrass prairie across the Flint Hills for nature and people. The way that we work is grounded in the idea of community-based conservation. It’s understanding how these systems evolved historically, the stresses that they’re under now and the stresses we expect them to be under in the future. We identify threats to landscape resilience and function and to areas of overlap with our partners in the community to identify what the most critical strategies need to be. 

What do you see as the greatest opportunities and challenges in your new role?  

The intent of this role is to view the Flint Hills of Kansas and Oklahoma as one larger landscape and increase collaboration for conservation at a larger scale. There’s a great opportunity to think about the Flint Hills as a whole system and to be able to effectively advocate for what it needs to meet our conservation and 2030 goals.

What is unique about wildlife in the Flint Hills?  

Prairie chickens are a valuable natural species to have in the Flint Hills in their own right, but their presence helps us point to what might be missing in that habitat and ecosystem type. Prairie chickens need residual cover for nesting, which is important for water infiltration and soil health as well as a host of other benefits. Prairie chickens are effectively losing habitat to woody plant encroachment. In parts of the Flint Hills, there’s good management of open prairie, but that doesn’t necessarily provide all of the habitat requirements that a prairie chicken would need. This has been a lens that we’ve been working with our partners in the ranching community to refocus and resolve conservation practices in the core of the Flint Hills to support these types of prairie chicken needs.  

Another part of my background has been doing research into dung beetles. They’re a fun species group to talk about because there’s great alignment between conservation and ranching. 

What are the key partnerships TNC engages in that are essential to your work? 

One of the things that makes the Flint Hills special is how close the different conservation partners work together. There’s strong alignment and vision among our partners, especially when it comes to things like field days, sharing lessons learned from our properties to help support their conservation efforts and become part of that storytelling. 

What do you wish more people knew about the Flint Hills? 

As someone who moved to the Flint Hills from out of state, it’s been amazing to see the conservation interest and ethic that people have for this place. I worry that we don’t talk enough about the threats that the landscape is facing. There’s great consensus that this place is special, but I don't know if the message is out there on how vulnerable the land is. If we want to keep this place, there is a need for dedicated work right now. 

I want to highlight the great work the team is doing. Tony Brown, Zoe Colatarci and Cole Starkey have all stepped up and are doing increased stewardship on our properties and leveraging our lands. They’re all doing amazing things across different TNC-owned properties to further the work across the Flint Hills and Great Plains division.