Investment → Land & Water → Habitat → Species response
The Program's logic chain at a glance: dollars secure land and water; land and water build habitat; habitat is what the three target species respond to. Each card pulls live numbers from the section below.
Spending
Where the money has gone, year by year, and how cumulative actual expenditures compare to the inflation-adjusted budget and indexed cash ceiling.
Cumulative actual vs expected · by category
The dashed expected lines are retained on these per-category panels — even though the headline chart above no longer shows them — so reviewers can see how each spending bucket has tracked against its inflation-adjusted plan over time.
Inflation index is the USBR General Property Index applied per workbook; factor resets to 1.000 in 2020 (Extension base year). Actual expenditures are nominal year-of-spend dollars; expected expenditures are the original program estimate restated into each year's dollars, so the two are directly comparable. Single-year actuals can run well above or below estimate because land and water acquisitions are lumpy capital outlays. Estimated expenditures for 2026–2032 are inflated at 3% per year.
Land
The Program's land portfolio — cumulative acres held by category against the First Increment Land Milestone and Extension Plus-Up, and the river miles managed at the habitat complexes.
Extension added a land Plus-Up of 1,500 acres for an additional habitat complex. The Program is currently 184 acres short of completing the Plus-Up but is well above the original 10,000 ac First Increment Milestone — during the First Increment, the Program acquired several existing conservation properties to prevent them from losing protection.
Program Document prioritized acquisition of land in the west half of the AHR. There is now a PRRIP habitat complex in each of those bridge segments. The Plus-Up established a complex in the final bridge segment in the east without a complex.
Water
The Program's water portfolio — the existing and conceptual projects now scoring toward the Water Milestone across storage, recharge, and recapture, and the year-by-year ledger of the Environmental Account.
Releases made to reduce deficits to USFWS target flows and test other flow management actions such as germination-suppression. End-of-year balance is the NET column running balance carried forward each year. Year strip above the chart shows the annual hydrologic condition: Wet · Normal · Dry.
The seasonal pattern shifted between eras: FI (brown) peaked in April; Extension (teal) is dominated by June germination-suppression flows. FI annual avg ≈ 35K AF/yr; Extension annual avg ≈ 56K AF/yr.
Plover & Tern
Off-channel sand and water (OCSW) nesting habitat alongside piping plover and least tern breeding response.
The 210 ac target was set by the Program's 2016 SDM process — roughly 60 ac above the habitat that existed at the time. The program-wide total (PRRIP + Other) first crossed it in 2021. Future years (2026–2032) are estimated based on current PRRIP lands being mined to create habitat.
Whooping Crane
Roosting-habitat suitability — unobstructed channel width and proportion of AHR highly suitable — alongside whooping crane use of the Associated Habitat Reach.
Highly suitable habitat is defined as unobstructed channel widths ≥ 650 ft. Two methods are shown back-to-back: visual classification (dashed, retired after 2018) and eCognition object-based classification (solid, 2019 onward). The 2017–2018 eCognition values have been retired so the two series do not overlap.
PRRIP-managed transects (n = 186; 69 West of Kearney, 117 East). Visual aerial-photo MUCW for 2007–2018; eCognition object-based MUCW for 2019–2024 — matches the methodology break in the basin-wide chart at left, so the two charts are directly comparable.
Progress vs. the 2006 EIS & Biological Opinion
The 2006 Final EIS and USFWS Biological Opinion set the bar for the First Increment. This scorecard places each commitment against current performance — quantitative where a number was set, directional where the BO specified only “increase.” Where the BO set no Program target, species are scored against the population-viability and recovery benchmarks the BO itself relied on. NEPA compliance for the First Increment rests on 10 formal milestones (Biological Opinion Milestones Document) — the Program has met 9, with only the 130–150k AF water Milestone still in progress.
Met = 2006 criterion satisfied (suffix marks basis: none = quantitative target · benchmark = at/above the BO’s cited productivity range · directional = BO directional indicator met). In progress = quantitative target partly met. Productivity ranges are population-viability / recovery benchmarks the BO relies on, not First-Increment targets; fledge ratios are off-channel (OCSW) with a 2010 protocol break, so they are scored against the range rather than across the break. Species response is Program-influenced, not solely Program-controlled. Pallid sturgeon is shown as a research commitment, not an outcome — the Program is testing, not assuming, a central-Platte→lower-Platte benefit. Sources: dashboard land / water / OCSW / species data, channel-width transects, the 2006 FEIS & Biological Opinion, the 2021 USFWS interior least tern delisting rule, and the 2021 PRRIP Pallid Sturgeon Agreement Framing Document.