Nine Mile Prairie near Lincoln, Nebraska, is a two hundred thirty-acre conserved tallgrass prairie and one of the largest remaining virgin prairies in the United States because most of it was never plowed. Its preservation was aided by its location inside a fenced buffer around a World War II-era bomb storage depot, and a two hundred twenty-eight-acre portion entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1986. It has long been important for scientific study, especially botany professor John Ernst Weaver’s research on prairie plant roots. Today it supports rich plant and bird life and serves both as a research landscape and as a refuge for a threatened Great Plains ecosystem.