The Nature Conservancy Protects More Native Grassland With Easements

DES MOINES, Iowa — August 27, 2008 — Long-time Plymouth County residents Barry and Carolyn Knapp recently donated an easement protecting 430 acres adjacent to Broken Kettle Grassland Preserve, Iowa’s largest contiguous native prairie. This is the fifth and final easement to be made to The Nature Conservancy by the Knapps, who now have put more than 2,100 acres in easement with the Conservancy in the Loess Hills since 2000. In addition to the easements, in 2007, the Knapps bought and donated a key 12-acre remnant adjacent to Broken Kettle Preserve.

“The Knapps are great partners. They have significant roots here having grown up on the land. They wanted to protect the land and pass on the legacy to their daughters and their grandchildren,” said Susanne Hickey, the Loess Hills project director for the Conservancy. “Their farm contains high-quality prairie, which will be protected from conversion, but still available for livestock grazing. This newest easement contains cropland, wetland and some pasture, which will be protected from further development, such as gravel mining or housing developments.”

“Looking down the valley, we were seeing big houses being built along the tops of hills. That’s the last thing we wanted on this land. We wanted to preserve the land in its present form and an easement gave us the ability to do this,” said Barry Knapp, self-described artist, farmer and retired pathologist. “There is no place we would rather be than home in the Loess Hills. My wife Carolyn and I have a real connection to this land and we wanted to conserve it for future generations. Our daughters, Noelle and Jill, were in agreement that this was the right thing to do.”

The additions to Broken Kettle, located just north of Sioux City in Plymouth County, push the protected acreage by The Nature Conservancy and its partners to more than 8,200 acres in that area.

“A conservation easement can benefit the landowner and be critical to our conservation efforts,” Hickey explained. “All easements are developed with individual landowners but most prohibit future housing developments, cultivation or tilling of the prairie and pasture, and mining. Almost all allow for livestock grazing, native prairie seed harvesting, haying and other compatible uses like hunting. Specifically, this latest easement will act as a buffer to core prairie areas and provide open space for the state designated bird conservation area.”

In the fall of 2008, bison will be re-introduced on the Conservancy’s 3,187-acre Broken Kettle Grassland Preserve. Broken Kettle Grasslands is located in the northern portion of the Loess Hills, which rise 200 feet above the Missouri River Valley, snaking in a narrow band of wrinkled bluffs that cover some 650,000 acres along the state’s western border.

The extensive prairie ridgetops at Broken Kettle Grasslands feature a variety of plants and animals typically found further west in the Great Plains, like the yucca plant and the prairie rattlesnake. Broken Kettle also harbors many plant species, including lead plant, big bluestem, silky aster, ground plum, side-oats gramma, downy painted cup, purple coneflower, snow-on-the-mountain, scarlet gaura, dotted blazing star, purple locoweed, pasque flower, bur oak, little bluestem, buffalo berry and scarlet globe mallow. Animal life includes the black-billed magpie, bobolink or grasshopper sparrow, western kingbird and the Great Plains toad.

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 of the original tallgrass prairie remains; making it one of North America’s most endangered ecosystems.

Grasslands of all kinds once covered 40 percent of the Earth’s land masses. But today, they are the least protected, most threatened terrestrial habitat on Earth. In fact, almost half of grasslands worldwide have been altered and the remaining landscapes face new and unprecedented threats. More than 800 million people live in the world’s grasslands, and most of them have a serious stake in the future of these places. With so many lives dependent on healthy, productive grasslands, their protection is integral to maintaining human well-being and biodiversity around the world..

The Nature Conservancy is a leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at www.nature.org.

The Nature Conservancy in Iowa has more than 7,500 members and manages 33 preserves totaling more than 6,000 acres. Since the Chapter began in 1963, with the aid of volunteers it has been involved in the protection of more than 20,000 acres in the state, including native prairies, wetlands and woodland communities.