(music)
[Abby Brown] Prairies in Iowa are actually pretty hard to find,
even though our state was once covered in them.
Remnant prairies are the ones that are the hardest to find
because they're the originals, they've been here for thousands of years!
Remnant prairies have hundreds of different kinds of plants.
The largest remnant prairies in Iowa are in the Loess Hills.
Smaller remnant prairies can be found in old graveyards or ditches and scattered in patches across the state.
Reconstructed prairies are made by humans
who purposefully chose seeds to be planted to grow into prairies.
It can take hundreds of years for a reconstructed prairie to grow and mature enough to be like a remnant prairie.
Why do you think it's important to reconstruct a prairie?
And how do you even do it? Let's go investigate!
(music)
[Abby] This is a reconstructed prairie. What does that mean?
[Tom Skilling] That means the prairie was gone from here, probably farmed,
like most areas in Iowa. And we decided to put it back into prairie.
So we bought some seeds. We harvested some seeds with a combine, and we replanted it.
(music)
(insect sounds)
[Tom] With prairie, the origin of the seed is important
because you don't want to take seed from Oklahoma and plant it here,
it doesn't grow right. It grows earlier and doesn't produce seed and all kinds of things.
[Abby] Maybe, even be invasive?
[Tom] Right. Right. So we get seed locally and we can do
that with a combine and that seed is well adapted to this area and that's why it does well here.
[Abby] Why is it important to reconstruct a prairie?
[Tom] Well in Iowa over 99.9% of the prairie is gone,
and so one of the ways we can help it is to replant it. And that's what reconstructions are all about.
[Abby] So how does the diversity of plant life in this prairie,
where you picked all the seeds and planted them,
how does that compare to a remnant prairie, where those plants have been there forever?
[Tom] This prairie has maybe 75 to 100 species,
which is a pretty good reconstruction.
[Abby] Yeah!
[Tom] But a good remnant prairie
may have 250 species, so it's maybe half.
(music)
[Abby] There's one more reconstructed prairie
I want to investigate with you today. Let's go!
(page turning)
(insects and birds chirping)
[Abby] About a three hour car ride from Union Slough is this!
A tallgrass prairie at Neal Smith Wildlife Refuge.
(music)
[Abby] This is also a reconstructed prairie.
People have worked really hard to bring this land back to prairie.
So Karen, what was this area before it was reconstructed to prairie?
[Karen Viste-Sparkman, Wildlife Biologist] Before the refuge was here it was farmland, just like most of Iowa.
[Abby] Sure. So you've done a lot of work here to bring this back.
Tell me about that work.
[Karen] Yeah, we have planted prairie seeds
and we do a lot of work after it's planted, too, with just trying to control the weeds and burning.
(music)
[Karen] Burning benefits the prairie
because it removes all the dead vegetation and stimulates new growth of the prairie plants.
[Abby] Tell me about the work that's involved
in getting the seeds and planting them.
[Karen] We get seeds from an area in Iowa that is close to the refuge.
It's a pretty big area.
It's about 38 counties in southern Iowa. We decided that we wanted to concentrate on the local area
because the plants are adapted to the conditions that we have here: the soil type and the weather.
(music)
[Abby] Why is it so important to reconstruct a prairie?
[Karen] Well, bringing back the prairie helps with the native wildlife,
with the plants. It gives us a place to go and experience prairie.
[Abby] Will your work here ever be done?
[Karen] Probably not. It's going to go on for hundreds of years.
[Abby] Iowa prairies appear in lots of shapes and sizes.
Some are old, some are new, some are huge, and some are small.
But one thing's for sure, they're an important part of our history.
What is one thing you can do right now to make sure that our state's prairie
is also an important part of our future?
Keep investigating and have fun!
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