Nov 10, 2021

UNI’s Tallgrass Prairie Center establishes native plants within Iowa’s roadsides

UNI’s Tallgrass Prairie Center establishes native plants within Iowa’s roadsides

The long-term objective of the state’s Living Roadway Trust Fund to establish diverse stands of native plants in roadway right-of-ways is being accomplished through UNI’s Tallgrass Prairie Center (TPC). The General Assembly and Governor adopted the Iowa Department of Transportation’s Living Roadway Trust Fund in 1988. Funding from the trust fund is provided to the TPC for their expertise.

Iowa’s over 800,000 acres of county and city roadsides provide a lot of potential area for seeding native plants. The TPC Iowa Roadside Management Program serves the state’s 47 county and 12 city roadside vegetation programs by facilitating communication and providing resources. Over the last year the program:

  • Welcomed two new counties to the Iowa roadside community, Keokuk and Wapello counties, who hired roadside vegetation managers for the first time. Roadside managers plant and manage roadside vegetation using an integrated, ecological approach.

  • Distributed 1,290 acres of seed for 40 counties to plant in their roadsides.

  • Produced new two- to three-minute videos. Cedar Falls filmmaker David O’Shields profiled roadside vegetation manager Wes Gibbs and engineer Derek Snead from Jones County. Ryan Lange with the UNI GeoTREE Center filmed a 360-degree video of the annual seed pickup, which Ethan narrated. All can be viewed on the program’s new YouTube channel, “Iowa Roadside Management.”

  • Collaborated with Trees Forever to implement Stewards of the Beautiful Land, a four-class webinar series that explores the importance of native plants and trees in Iowa ecosystems.

 

Integrated Roadside Vegetation Management (IRVM) is an approach to right-of-way maintenance that combines strong, weed-resistant plant communities that adapt to all roadside conditions and provide a variety of services: enhancing rainfall infiltration; slowing runoff; trapping sediment; reducing erosion, and creating habitat for pollinators, nesting birds, and other wildlife.

 

Another of the Center’s programs, the Plant Materials Program, also funded by the Living Roadway Trust Fund since 1990, helps to bring affordable, genetically diverse and regionally appropriate native seed to the marketplace. This year this program:

  • Released 30 seed lots of Iowa source-identified foundation seed to native seed growers.

  • Harvested 104 pounds of seed from 35 production plots.

  • Started seedlings of 12 ecotypes to refresh aging or depleted seed lots.

  • Transplanted about 8,000 seedlings into new production plots.

The TPC empowers people to value and restore diverse, resilient tallgrass prairies. Their goals are to build the capacity of partners and stakeholders to plant prairie and expand public awareness of and appreciation for the prairie ecosystem. The TPC also provides hands-on experiences for UNI students who want to pursue diverse careers in biology, conservation, ecological restoration, horticulture and environmental science. More information on the center’s 2021 annual report can be found here.