Iowa's Remarkable Soils

Iowa's Remarkable Soils
Author: Kathleen Woida
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2021-05
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1609387503

In language that is scientifically sound but accessible to the layperson, Kathleen Woida explains how Iowa's soils formed and have changed over centuries and millennia. Its soils are what make Iowa a premier agricultural state, both in terms of acres planted and bushels harvested. But in the last hundred years, large-scale intensive agriculture and urban development have severely degraded most of our soils. However, as Woida documents, some innovative Iowans are beginning to repair and regenerate their soils by treating them as the living ecosystem and vast carbon store that they are.

Iowa's Remarkable Soils

Iowa's Remarkable Soils
Author: Kathleen Woida
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2021-05-03
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1609387511

Sometimes called “black gold,” Iowa’s deep, rich soils are a treasure that formed over thousands of years under the very best of the world’s grasslands—the tallgrass prairie. The soils are diverse and complex and hold within them a record not only of Iowa’s prehistoric past, but also of the changes that took place after settlers utterly transformed the land, as well as the ongoing adjustments taking place today due to climate change. In language that is scientifically sound but accessible to the layperson, Kathleen Woida explains how soils formed and have changed over centuries and millennia in the land between two rivers. Its soils are what make Iowa a premier agricultural state, both in terms of acres planted and bushels harvested. But in the last hundred years, large-scale intensive agriculture and urban development have severely degraded most of our soils. However, as Woida documents, some innovative Iowans are beginning to repair and regenerate their soils by treating them as the living ecosystem and vast carbon store that they are. To paraphrase Aldo Leopold, these new pioneers are beginning to see their soils as part of a community to which they and their descendants belong, rather than commodities belonging to them.

Tending Iowa’s Land

Tending Iowa’s Land
Author: Cornelia F. Mutel
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2022-12-28
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1609388747

2023 Midwest Book Awards in Nonfiction - Nature, winner In the last 200 years, Iowa’s prairies and other wildlands have been transformed into vast agricultural fields. This massive conversion has provided us with food, fiber, and fuel in abundance. But it has also robbed Iowa’s land of its native resilience and created the environmental problems that today challenge our everyday lives: polluted waters, increasing floods, loss and degradation of rich prairie topsoil, compromised natural systems, and now climate change. In a straightforward, friendly style, Iowa’s premier scientists and experts consider what has happened to our land and outline viable solutions that benefit agriculture as well as the state’s human and wild residents.

A New History of Iowa

A New History of Iowa
Author: Jeff Bremer
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 472
Release: 2023-10-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0700635564

The state of Iowa is largely unappreciated and often misunderstood. It has a small population and sits in the middle of a huge country. It’s thought of as an uninspiring place full of farms and fields of corn. But Iowa represents America as surely as New York and California, and Iowa’s history is more dynamic, complicated, and influential than commonly imagined. Jeff Bremer’s A New History of Iowa offers the most comprehensive history of the Hawkeye State ever written, surveying Iowa from the last ice age through the COVID-19 pandemic. It tells a new and vibrant story, examining the state’s small-town culture, politics, social and economic development, and its many diverse inhabitants. Bremer features well-known individuals, such as Sauk leader Black Hawk, artist Grant Wood, botanist George Washington Carver, suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, and President Herbert Hoover. But Bremer broadens the state’s story by including new voices—among them, runaway enslaved men who joined Iowa’s 60th Colored Regiment in the Civil War, young female pearl button factory workers, Latino railroad workers who migrated to the state in the early twentieth century, and recent refugees from Southeast Asia and the Balkans. This new story of Iowa provides a brisk, readable narrative written for a broad audience, from high school and college students to teachers and scholars to general readers. It tells the story of ordinary and extraordinary people of all backgrounds and greatly improves our knowledge of a state whose history has been neglected. A New History of Iowa is for everyone who wants to learn about Iowa’s surprising, complex, and remarkable past.

Iowa's Changing Wildlife

Iowa's Changing Wildlife
Author: James J. Dinsmore
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2023-12-05
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1609389263

Much has changed with Iowa’s wildlife in the years 1990 to 2020. Some species such as Canada goose, wild turkey, and white-tailed deer that once were rare in Iowa are now common, and others like sandhill crane, river otter, and trumpeter swan are becoming increasingly abundant. Iowa’s Changing Wildlife provides an up-to-date, scientifically based summary of changes in the distribution, status, conservation needs, and future prospects of about sixty species of Iowa’s birds and mammals whose populations have increased or decreased in the past three decades. Readers will learn more about familiar species, become acquainted with the status of less familiar species, and find out how many of the species around them have fared during this era of transformation.

The Natural History of the Snakes and Lizards of Iowa

The Natural History of the Snakes and Lizards of Iowa
Author: Terry VanDeWalle
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2022-08-10
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1609388380

This book is an in-depth look at the natural history of each snake and lizard species/subspecies found in Iowa. Each of the thirty-three species accounts includes a sampling of the common names the species has been known by in the past, the first specimens collected in the state, and a brief history of the early Iowa literature related to the species, along with a complete description and a discussion of similar species, distribution in the state, habitat, behavior, threats, foods and feeding, and reproduction. While readers will be able to identify Iowa’s snakes and lizards through its species accounts, identification keys, and beautiful photographs and illustrations, this book is intended to be more than a field guide. What makes it truly unique is the comparison of historic data collected by Iowa herpetologists in the 1930s and 1940s with data collected by the author, along with James L. Christiansen and others, since 1960. Custom maps show the reader how species’ distributions have changed over time.

The Gumbo Soils of Iowa

The Gumbo Soils of Iowa
Author: William Henry Stevenson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 32
Release: 1911
Genre: Agricultural experiment stations
ISBN: