Iowa's Prairie Legacy

Prairie can mean a lot of things. It can be a type of landscape. It can be used to refer to a type of architecture, a type of cooking, or a type of literature. It can be the name of a place.

Prairie can also refer to a type of ecosystem. This ecosystem is characterized by the types of plants present. Typically there are no trees. Grasses dominate, although there are flowering plants and brushy plants as well.

The prairie habitat was very diverse. If you were to look at a portion of prairie about the size of a convenience store parking lot, you probably could have found 400 or so species of plants within that area. The prairie had its large creatures--bison, elk, bears, and wolves. It also had thousands of smaller creatures. Each of those 400 species of plants may have had one or two to as many as a dozen insects that lived only on that plant at a particular stage of its life cycle. There were also generalist insects which could use a variety of plants or which preyed on other insects.

If you look at Iowa's landscape today it is obvious that the bison, elk, bears, and wolves are gone. But if you look at the types of plants present--take an area the size of the convenience store parking lot again--you will find something that is significantly different than the prairie ecosystem. That same area might have 40 species. A few of those species are native, but half or more are weedy plants that originally came from somewhere else. There are still insects, but the group that specialized on specific plants that are gone will also be gone. The insects that are present now are more likely to be generalists than specialists. And, while the numbers of the small animals are similar or higher to historical numbers, the total diversity is lower.

So if you define the prairie by the plant communities that are present--high levels of diversity, including certain characteristic plants there is still some prairie left. There are small prairie remnants that range in size from less than an acre to several hundred acres scattered around the state. Estimates vary, but for Iowa the amount of prairie left is somewhere around 1/10 of 1 percent.

Iowa still has soil that is mostly black dirt. If you grew up here you might not think that unusual but it is. Our black dirt is a legacy of the prairie. This is the topsoil that has made Iowa such an important agricultural producer.

The prairie is mostly gone. We did not realize how valuable it was until we had systematically replaced it with farm fields, houses, and cities. But a small amount of it still persists. Can we find room for it?

And the prairie itself is a part of our legacy. It very much determined what we are today.