Nature Conservancy Expands Loess Hills Special Landscape Area with Recent Donation

DES MOINES, IA—March 30,2006—With the recent donation of 45 acres by Neal and Izen Ratzlaff, the Nature Conservancy is able to once again expand the protected land in the Loess Hills area. This property is located in the Loveland Special Landscape Area located in the Loess Hills in northern Pottawattamie County.

Within the Loess Hills, there are 12 Special Landscape Areas (SLA) that capture about 80 percent of the biodiversity in the landform. The Loveland SLA contains 3,828 acres with more than 1,800 acres of protected land including the Hitchcock Nature Area owned by the Pottawattamie County Conservation Board and the Romeo easement completed by Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation. The Ratzlaff tract will add another 45 acres of protected land to this SLA.

The Loveland site stretches from southern Harrison County down into Pottawattamie County, skimming the western border of the landform region. The site has highly visible, high-quality prairies on ridgetops, steep slopes and bluffs. Its precipitous slopes with narrow, deep valleys are largely covered with bur oak and other woodlands. The Ratzlaff tract contains bur oak woodland habitat with some ridge line oak savanna.

The Ratzlaffs have been involved in conservation and with the Conservancy for many years. “I’m passionate about the Loess Hills area – its beauty and unique plant and animal species. So many people don’t realize what they have in the Loess Hills. This particular area is being threatened by development at an alarming rate and it needs protection now,” said Neal Ratzlaff, a former Iowa and Nebraska Conservancy board member.

Ratzlaff is a retired physician. However, his devotion to conservation has led him to a second career as a writer, photographer and naturalist, recently collaborating with Roland Barth on A Field Guide to the Wild Flowers of the Fontenelle Forest and Neal Woods Nature Centers. They are currently developing a companion book on the trees, shrubs, woody vines, sedges and grasses. The Ratzlaffs live in Omaha.

The Conservancy is looking for a conservation buyer to buy the property subject to a conservation easement. All easement contracts are developed with individual landowners but most prohibit future housing developments, cultivation or tilling of the land and mining. This easement may allow for one house to be built on the property. Almost all easements allow for livestock grazing, native prairie seed harvesting, haying and other compatible uses like hunting. A conservation easement can benefit the landowner and be critical to conservation efforts.

“It's been a pleasure to work with the Ratzlaff's in protecting this parcel in the hills – with the sale of the land with an easement – it will enable the donation to protect more than the original 45 acres. The Conservancy will put the proceeds of the sale back into our Loess Hills program,” said Susanne Hickey, Loess Hills project director for The Nature Conservancy.

The Loess Hills, which rise 200 feet above the Missouri River Valley, snake in a narrow band of wrinkled bluffs that cover some 650,000 acres along the state’s western border. This region supports some of Iowa’s best examples of tallgrass prairie, which originally covered 25 million acres across parts of Iowa and Minnesota. Today, less than one percent remains; making it one of North America’s most endangered ecosystems.

The Nature Conservancy and its partners also protect 7,300 acres in Iowa’s largest contiguous native prairie, Broken Kettle Grasslands, located just north of Sioux City in Plymouth County.