On the Platte River in Nebraska, Brice Krohn leads a team of biologists to scour the river with heavy machinery in order to perform functions that used to be carried out naturally by spring floods in order to maintain a river landscape that can continue to support Sandhill Crane migration as it has for hundreds of thousands of years.

Deep in the Grand Canyon, Brian Healy leads a team of biologists to load the humpback chub, an endangered fish, into barrels and fly them by helicopter into remote tributaries of the Colorado River in a last ditch effort to repopulate them into their native streams lest the species go extinct.

When alerted to an endangered colony of prairie dogs, whose numbers have been greatly reduced due to decades of organized poisonings and intensive land development, Lindsey Sterling Krank leads a team to use construction equipment and industrial tubing to build artificial burrows to rescue them from a gruesome death.

In the 21st century, defending the wild often paradoxically requires technology and aggressive human intervention. The Nature Makers is a moving portrait of passionate people and the extraordinary creatures whose existence they fight for. The film is a story of how we found ourselves on the brink of losing so much of the natural world, yet it charts an optimistic, though unmistakably challenging, path forward.