Subscribe to the new Harvest newsletter for our latest reporting on agriculture and the environment, behind-the-scenes exclusives, and more.
American prairies are a threatened ecosystem, but they’re not completely lost. Across the central U.S., people are working to preserve and restore the native landscapes.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates about 80% of original grassland ecosystems in the U.S. are gone, and the vast majority of prairies from western Indiana to the Rocky Mountains have been turned into farmland and residential areas. Prairies are disappearing faster than people can conserve them, according to the agency.
To restore prairie, it usually requires removing whatever plants and vegetation are present, like turfgrass or agricultural crops, and planting or spreading a mix of native prairie seeds, including wildflowers. Prairies offer essential habitat for wildlife, sequester carbon and prevent flooding.
There are several efforts tackling big swaths of prairie across several states. For example, the American Prairie Reserve aims to re-establish about 3 million acres of prairie in northeast Montana. And the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working to restore 15,000 acres in the prairie pothole region, which stretches from the Dakotas to Iowa.
Conservationists across the region are also working to bring back prairies on much smaller scales.
An Illinois university carves out a patch of prairie
Northern Illinois University is converting a 40-acre field on its campus to prairie.
Over the next two years, hired contractors will kill the existing turf grass and seed the field with native prairie plants, like black-eyed Susans. Courtney Gallaher, director of sustainability at the university who is leading the project, expects the field to be in full bloom by 2029.
Gallaher said the restoration will promote pollinator habitat, reduce synthetic inputs like fertilizer and pesticides, and add more green space for students and the community.
Illinois was once home to 22 million acres of tallgrass prairie, which is characterized by plants like the big bluestem. Now, less than 0.01% remains.
“No one person or organization can restore all the prairies in Illinois or change the world in some other capacity,” Gallaher said. “But, if you help people to understand why it's valuable and sort of how to start the process, then it has the opportunity to continue.”
Gallaher said it’s important that the area can continue to be used by people, rather than be partitioned off as a protected ecosystem. There will be designated areas for the marching band and cross-country teams to practice, and trails throughout.
“People have a lot of feelings around it,” she said. “So, figuring out how to help people create a new, shared vision for what the space can be, I think, is exciting. Unlike a prairie reserve that might be out in a very rural area, once it's there, people are really going to be attached to it.”
Holly Hansen, assistant director of sustainability and environmental educator at the university, said many humans have lost touch with nature, but spending time in places like this future prairie can inspire people to care more about protecting native landscapes.
"That happens from seeing the different bird species and the flowers and the pollinator insects,” she said. “And just spending time grounding yourself in green space. Because that's what makes people care about other, more abstract sustainability issues and environmental conservation issues.”
The project is one of many efforts to create urban preserves in northern Illinois, and Gallaher said she is seeing more prairie restoration around the Midwest.
A Kansas nonprofit replants prairies a few acres at a time
In northeast Kansas, Native Lands Restoration Collaborative works to restore pockets of prairie.
Sometimes those areas are as small as five acres, said executive director Courtney Masterson. But the nonprofit prioritizes projects that have an educational or community benefit.
“The spaces we build together today will be the spaces that allow us to advocate for more in the future,” she said.
The collaborative is reconstructing a prairie on Emporia State University’s campus and restoring 22 acres along the Kansas River near Topeka, among other projects.
Masterson said there are limited state resources for restoration projects in Kansas, so the nonprofit relies on grants and private funding. Masterson said that can make the work more difficult, but she said it’s worth doing at any scale.
"We're all in prairie, and it's our historic landscape,” she said. “It's something that you don't have to be an expert to do. Whatever community you live in, there's an organization trying hard to restore what they can. And if you don't know where to start, just start volunteering.”
A remnant prairie in Texas seeds dozens of new projects
There used to be millions of acres of coastal prairie stretching from Mexico to Louisiana, but nearly all of that has disappeared.
About 50 miles from Houston, Texas, Nash Prairie Preserve is what ecologists call a remnant prairie, a rare instance of prairie that has never been plowed. The 427-acre prairie is owned and operated by The Nature Conservancy. Restoration manager Aaron Tjelmeland calls it a “hyperdiverse system," and said it’s home to about 350 plant species.
Because it’s such a special system, The Nature Conservancy collects native prairie seeds from Nash to restore other land nearby. The seeds have helped to reestablish more than 150 acres across 58 prairie projects in the Houston area, according to The Nature Conservancy.
“Year after year, you're investing that time and energy into those properties, so that they'll continue to produce... and continue to be those reservoirs for restoration,” Tjelmeland said.
Tjelmeland also works with native seed growers to make sure there’s enough for projects across the region. He said the more people work to bring back prairies, the easier it is to seed new projects.
“There's always a lot of work to be done on it, but seeing the changes over time, and seeing that maintained and bloom through the years is really rewarding,” Tjelmeland said.
A South Dakota park turns farmland into grassland
Geoffrey Gray-Lobe is a county commissioner and board member with the Clay County Park, a few hundred acres along the Missouri River where South Dakotans can camp, boat, picnic and hike. He has led the effort to convert about 30 acres of the park into native prairie.
The site is part of 125 acres the park has been renting to farmers for years. Gray-Lobe said he did some research and found the park could more than double the rent it charges on the land.
“It was relatively easy to take 31 and a half acres and make plans to take that out of production, knowing that we were going to be getting more revenue off the remaining 90 acres,” Gray-Lobe said.
Gray-Lobe secured a prairie seed mix to plant, and he and a group of volunteers also harvested seed heads from a nearby natural area. Volunteers helped spread the first seeds last February.
Gray-Lobe said it’s important to him to connect his community to the restoration efforts. He said he always brings volunteers with him when he goes out to work on the project – especially on the first day of spreading seeds.
“It was joyful,” he said. “I made sure to give everybody who came a list of the species that they spread that day. My hope is that they could actually come back with their kids or their grandkids, seek out some of those species and then say, ‘I was there on day one, when we first planted this.’"
This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.
