Nebraskaland: Nebraska's Conservation Magazine at One Hundred Years
Nebraskaland is the magazine of the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, published from Lincoln, Nebraska, and devoted to the state's wildlife, state parks, hunting, fishing, and outdoor heritage. In 2026 it reaches a milestone few American magazines can claim: its one hundredth anniversary. It began in June 1926 as Outdoor Nebraska, a sixteen-page quarterly whose first cover showed a young person fishing, and it has been published by the state's conservation agency and its predecessors ever since.
The magazine's official description states its purpose plainly: published since June 1926 by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, Nebraskaland promotes the stewardship and conservation of Nebraska's natural resources and outdoor spaces, with outstanding photography and engaging storytelling at its core. It showcases hunting, fishing, camping, boating, and wildlife viewing, within the state parks system and beyond — and people, the agency notes, are at the heart of it. A century in, the magazine stands as a chronicle of Nebraska's history and culture as much as of its fish and game.
Overview
Nebraskaland is Nebraska's state conservation magazine, sold by subscription and at retailers throughout the state, and published ten times a year in its modern schedule. It is produced by staff of the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission — writers, editors, and photographers who are also the state's public storytellers for wildlife and parks. Regional editors work different parts of a large, ecologically varied state, from the Pine Ridge and Sandhills to the Platte River valley and the Missouri River bluffs.
That geography defines the magazine. Nebraska spans the transition from eastern tallgrass prairie to western high plains, and the magazine's pages move accordingly: sandhill cranes on the Platte, mule deer in the northwest, walleye and muskies in reservoirs, bighorn sheep in the Wildcat Hills, and the human communities — ranch families, small towns, conservation officers, biologists — who live with that wildlife. For subscribers, many of them hunters, anglers, campers, and park visitors, Nebraskaland functions as both a practical guide and a celebration of the Nebraska outdoors.
History and Founding
Nebraskaland was founded by Frank B. O'Connell, the state's first conservation officer, who later became director of the agency now known as the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission. The first issue of Outdoor Nebraska appeared in June 1926, published by the state Bureau of Game and Fish — part of the Department of Agriculture — to educate readers on hunting and fishing laws and the importance of conservation. The inaugural issue ran sixteen pages with a cover image of a young person fishing, and O'Connell wrote in it that the people of the Middle West were awakening to the fact that unless something was done quickly, the wildlife and natural beauty of the prairie would vanish.
The context was a continental wildlife crisis: by 1900, white-tailed deer had fallen from roughly thirty million to a few hundred thousand, Canada geese neared disappearance, and bison, once in the millions, numbered under a hundred. The magazine promoted Nebraska's young state parks — Chadron State Park was five years old, and early issues repeatedly urged eastern Nebraska readers to discover the Pine Ridge's buttes and forests. In 1958 the magazine moved from quarterly to monthly publication, and in 1964 its name changed from Outdoor Nebraska to NEBRASKAland, with variant stylings over the years. Through the agency's reorganizations — from Bureau of Game and Fish to the Game, Forestation and Parks Commission to today's Game and Parks Commission — the magazine never stopped publishing.
Publisher and Ownership
The publisher is the State of Nebraska, through the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and its predecessor entities, which have published the magazine continuously since 1926. It is one of the classic American state conservation magazines: an agency publication, funded through subscriptions, retail sales, and the commission's conservation mission rather than general newsstand economics. Its staff are state employees — editors, regional editors, and photographers — whose work also documents agency programs.
Public ownership gives the magazine a distinctive accountability. It explains hunting and fishing regulations, promotes state parks and recreation areas the commission manages, and reports on conservation work paid for by license buyers and park users. At the same time, its editors have built a magazine that competes on craft: the commission itself notes that many gifted writers, illustrators, and photographers have dedicated their careers to it over the last hundred years, setting high standards for outdoor journalism and winning many awards. The magazine welcomes high-quality freelance photography and writing submissions, and runs an annual photo contest open to photographers of all ages and skill levels.
Editorial Content and Sections
Nebraskaland's content blends conservation reporting, how-to guidance, history, and photography. Features cover wildlife species and their management, fisheries — such as the muskellunge of Merritt Reservoir, "the fish of a thousand casts," whose story editor Jeff Kurrus told in an April issue — habitat and ecology, state park profiles, and the people of outdoor Nebraska. Practical articles offer pointers for turkey hunting and fly-fishing, explain new trails such as the Platte River Water Trail, and give first-hand accounts, whether of a conservation officer rescuing a baby bald eagle or a participant's experience in the Becoming an Outdoors-Woman program.
The magazine is also a venue for natural history and reflection: ecologist Chris Helzer has written on the history of conservation on his family's quarter-section of prairie in Hamilton County, and staff have documented events from the devastating 2019 flooding of state properties to photo spreads pairing Panhandle landforms with sun and moon. Seasonal rhythms organize the year — hunting seasons, fishing runs, the spring crane migration, park openings — and the January/February issue traditionally showcases the winners of the annual photo contest. Departments and photography features give readers regular points of entry alongside the long features.
Audience and Circulation
Nebraskaland is published ten times a year and has been reported at more than 22,000 subscribers — a substantial audience for a single-state conservation magazine, built over a century of publication. Copies are also sold at retailers throughout Nebraska, and the digital version reaches readers online. The audience is rooted in the state's outdoor community: hunters, anglers, campers, boaters, birders, park visitors, and the rural and small-town readers for whom wildlife is part of daily life.
The readership is participatory in a way few magazines enjoy. The annual photo contest draws hundreds of entries — editor Jeff Kurrus noted more than 850 applicants in one year's contest — with adult categories for wildlife, scenic, recreation, and flora subjects, a youth division for photographers seventeen and under, and public voting elements in some years. Judges insist that species pictured be native to Nebraska, a standard the staff takes seriously: the magazine exists to show readers exactly what Nebraska is made of. Readers also contribute writing and photography through the magazine's submissions program, making Nebraskaland partly a community publication — an identity a hundred years of continuity makes credible.
Print and Digital Editions
Print remains the magazine's core: a glossy, photography-led magazine delivered by subscription and sold statewide, published ten times a year. The commission also maintains a photo library of more than a million images taken by the magazine's award-winning staff photographers, available to view or purchase — an archive that reflects how central commissioned photography has been to the publication since its early decades.
The digital transformation is most visible in the Nebraskaland Magazine Digital Archive. First launched in 2020 with the magazine's first fifty years, the archive was expanded and migrated to Game and Parks' own platform so that it now covers the full hundred years. It assembles page scans from print issues held by the commission and by the University of Nebraska and Nebraska Wesleyan University libraries — no single repository held the complete run, and the earliest issues are especially rare — along with born-digital documents. One recovered rarity was the Summer 1939 issue, printed in a non-standard fold-out map format that took a decade to track down. The magazine's current site also offers recent years of digital issues, photo contest entry, and subscription services, connecting the print institution to a new generation of readers.
Notable Editors and Contributors
Frank B. O'Connell stands first in the magazine's history: founder, first conservation officer, and founding editorial voice, whose warning about the prairie's vanishing wildlife set the magazine's mission in 1926. Successive generations of Game and Parks writers and photographers built the institution he started; the commission credits them collectively with a century of award-winning outdoor journalism.
In the modern era, Jeff Kurrus has served as the magazine's editor, writing signature features such as the Merritt Reservoir muskie story and speaking for the magazine as the public face of its photo contest. Regional editor Justin Haag, a Chadron State College alumnus based in the Panhandle, has become a prominent contributor and the magazine's centennial interpreter — delivering the Graves Lecture at Chadron State College in February 2026 on a hundred years of Nebraskaland and the conservation movement behind it. Regional editor Eric Fowler contributed major reporting such as the account of the 2019 floods' damage to state lands. Contributors from beyond the staff include ecologist Chris Helzer, whose prairie writing connects the magazine to contemporary grassland science, and the hundreds of Nebraska photographers whose contest entries fill its winter issues.
Awards and Recognition
The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission describes Nebraskaland's staff as award-winning across the magazine's history, with its writers, illustrators, and photographers achieving many awards over their careers showcasing outdoor Nebraska. Within the fraternity of state conservation magazines — a genre that includes some of America's longest-running outdoor publications — Nebraskaland's distinction is its combination of photography, storytelling, and a hundred years of unbroken publication under one state's conservation agency.
The centennial year has brought formal recognition of that standing. The magazine's 100th anniversary was the subject of a Graves Lecture at Chadron State College's Sandoz Center — an academic honor for a state magazine — and of regional news coverage marking the centennial and its focus on Nebraska's conservation legacy. The expanded digital archive, covering the full century, has itself been recognized as a preservation achievement, reuniting a complete run that existed in no single library. The annual photo contest adds a populist form of recognition, with Best in Show and category prizes awarded each year and winning work published in the magazine — honors the state's photography community actively seeks.
Recent Developments
Nebraskaland's hundredth anniversary in 2026 anchors its recent story. The magazine is marking the centennial with a focus on its conservation legacy — public programming such as Justin Haag's February 2026 lecture placed the magazine within the broader history of the American conservation movement, from the wildlife collapses of 1900 to Nebraska's recovery of deer, geese, and other species the magazine once warned were vanishing. Nebraska's conservation officers are simultaneously celebrating their own centenary in 2026, dating to the same founding generation as the magazine.
The other headline development is archival: the digital archive's second, expanded release now covers all one hundred years, adding issues and pages missing from the 2020 launch and moving to a Game and Parks-hosted platform with a new address and updated design. Meanwhile the magazine's living routines continue — the 2026 photo contest opened for submissions on October 1, with categories spanning macro photography, flora and fauna, landscape, and hunting and fishing, winners to appear in the January/February 2027 issue. A century after a sixteen-page quarterly warned that the prairie's wildlife might vanish, Nebraskaland is still publishing ten times a year — and the wildlife, in considerable part thanks to the conservation culture the magazine helped build, is still there to photograph.
