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If you passed through Iowa thousands of
years ago, the land of corn and soybeans would
look more like this - open prairie as far as the eye
can see.
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An ecosystem of apparent simplicity from
hundreds of feet above, but fly closer to the land
below, and you discover a vibrant environment.
Stretching for miles in Central Iowa, the Neal
Smith Wildlife Refuge - once farmland, but now
restored prairie.
Karen Viste-Sparkman: Most of this is what we call
restored or reconstructed prairie.
So it started out as farm fields when the refuge
started anyway.
Established in 1990, specialists began seeding
the former farmland with seeds from remnant
prairies, known for their more advanced
biodiversity.
Karen Viste-Sparkman: So the area that our seed
comes from is 39 counties in Iowa.
So it's a pretty big area that we have seed from.
So we hope that preserves some of the genetic
diversity.
There's more to a prairie though than the plants.
So there's insects and other animals, in the soil
there's bacteria.
Meticulously restored prairies may contain up to
100 different species of grasses and flora, but
that pales in comparison to well-maintained remnant
tracts that can contain nearly 400 different
species.
It's a biodiversity that can take hundreds or
thousands of years to create.
Biologists at Neal Smith Refuge believe it will
take far more than the past 30 years for a
restored prairie to more closely resemble a
remnant.
Karen Viste-Sparkman: Well, it's probably going
to take centuries.
It changes over time and it will just keep changing
through time.
We're not sure if it's ever going to be like a
remnant prairie.
Iowa prairies like Neal Smith are surrounded by
rural roads, which present their own issues for
prairie ecosystems and a phenomenon known as the
prairie "edge effect".
Karen Viste-Sparkman: In the prairie, especially in
Iowa, we have a road about every mile.
And so there is always that edge right around the
roads and where there's adjacent farm fields.
What that means is there's avenues for some of the
invasive plant species to come in.
There's a lot of disturbance from just
vehicles going by.
So in terms of the wildlife that live here,
they might be more likely to get hit by a car and
killed.
But it just kind of disrupts the prairie so
it's not continuous.
The vast majority of Iowa's soil is tilled and
planted with corn and soybeans.
To find true remnant prairies you can look to
the state's western border, north of Sioux
City.
That's where you will find the Broken Kettle
Grasslands, Iowa's largest remaining tract of
original prairie.
Karen Viste-Sparkman: The remnants that are left
are, a lot of them are places that were not
farmed for some reasons.
The prairie plants have deep roots.
They help hold the soil and prevent erosion from
happening and that helps keep the waterways clean.
So there's just a variety of benefits we get from
prairie.
Encompassing 6,000 acres, Broken Kettle is also
Iowa's largest preserve and it contains more than
200 of the largest land mammals in North America,
bison.
Re-introduced to Broken Kettle in 2008, the herd
now wanders through remnant Iowa prairie.
It's an image harkening back to Iowa's landscape
only centuries ago.
Bison are grass-eating herbivores, right at home
in remnant prairie grasses that once covered the land
of corn and soybeans.
Karen Viste-Sparkman: Just the root systems of
prairie plants go really deep into the soil so it's
able to take carbon from the air and other
nutrients and put them down into the ground and
then through centuries of those plants dying and
decomposing they just helped build the soil and
kept it in place.
Really we wouldn't have this farmland in Iowa if
prairie hadn't built the soil that we use.
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Funding for Iowa Land and Sky provided by
The Resource Enhancement and Protection
Conservation Education Program.
The Gilchrist Foundation, founded by Jocelyn
Gilchrist, furthering the philanthropic interests of
the Gilchrist family in wildlife and conservation,
the arts and public broadcasting and disaster
relief.
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