Our City Park State Preserve

On a recent visit to Ryerson's Woods, a hilly, wooded park tucked into the corner where Old Highway 218 meets "new" Highway 218 just a few minutes' drive from the Sycamore Greenway, I noted that the signage called it a State Preserve.

State Preserve? I thought it was a city park, owned and managed by the city. What is this State Preserve?

Turns out, it's both! The land was acquired by the city in 1985, 49 acres of high-quality woodland that was apparently (and fortunately) too difficult to convert into row crops--the fate of much of our state's land--and thus managed to maintain an incredibly diverse number of species within its borders. 

Although city and county parks and conservation areas, as well as land trusts like Bur Oak Land Trust, do great work protecting and maintaining land to limit the effects of harmful non-native plants and promote the growth of valuable native species, once land has been developed and used for agriculture or other industry, that original variety of species is gone forever. It will never come back as it was originally, no matter how carefully it is managed.

That's why treasures like Ryerson's Woods are so special: they give us a tiny glimpse of what our state was before it was turned over to agriculture and other development. Because of its unique nature and value to both science and education, botanist Diana Horton and others advocated to have it declared a woodland State Preserve in 2014.

According to the DNR:

"Legislation in 1965 created the Iowa State Preserves System to identify and preserve, for this and future generations, portions of our natural prehistorical and historical heritage, and to maintain preserved lands as nearly as possible in their natural condition."

 A designation as a State Preserve would add an additional layer of prestige and protection to Ryerson's Woods, as well as opening up additional funding opportunities to maintain and protect the area. In September 2014 it was dedicated as a State Preserve by then-governor Terry Branstad. 

In 2021, the city was awarded a $200,000 REAP grant to improve and enhance the preserve. Work will include removing invasive species and adding additional native plants, as well as work on the trails and interpretive signage. 

If you haven't yet visited this gem on the south side of Iowa City, now is the perfect time to catch sight of some of those beautiful remnants of our state's bygone natural era.

Sources/Additional Reading:

• City Council Community Comment Transcript 6-17-14
• City Council Public Hearing Minutes 6-17-14
• Iowa City Press Citizen, "Ryerson's Woods Park is an Iowa City treasure" by Judith Klink

Nourish Your Spirit with Springtime Events Around Town

 

Erythronium, a spring ephemeral
(photographed at Ryerson's Woods)

There are so many opportunities to learn about prairie plants, trees, gardening, birds, and more in our community in coming months!

Green Iowa AmeriCorps is hosting Nature Walks at Hickory Hill and Waterworks Prairie Park on Wednesdays from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. throughout the spring and summer. Sign up to learn prairie plant ID on these hikes at https://www.signupgenius.com/go/409044caba728a1ff2-nature.

 The UI Pentacrest Museums are offering monthly Tree Tours to nourish your mind, body, and soul with informative walks around the campus. See the schedule at https://pentacrestmuseums.uiowa.edu/tree-tours.

Green Iowa AmeriCorps is also hosting a series of Gardening Basics sessions at the Wetherby Park garden plots for those interested in learning about growing and maintaining their own gardens. 

We've already shared that Green Iowa AmeriCorps will be leading neighborhood bird walks along the Greenway and at other locations around town...keep an eye out for those dates and times coming up in May. 

Johnson County Conservation is hosting a pair of hikes at Cangleska Wakan on April 22 and May 12 to see spring ephemerals, those woodland wildflowers that bloom briefly before the trees leaf out. Registration is required.

And then mark your calendars for a couple of opportunities to learn about our Iowa City infrastructure! Have you seen the new electric buses doing their thing on routes around town? The city is celebrating them with an Electric Bus Bash at Riverfront Crossings on Earth Day, April 22. And then on May 21 visit the new Public Works Building at an open house during National Public Works Week. 

Whew! 

152 Pieces Per Person

Nearly 10 billion butts!

Did you catch the Things You Didn’t Know About Litter presentation the other day? Among all of the great data points provided was one from the Keep America Beautiful 2020 National Litter Study: there are an estimated 50 billion pieces of litter out in our environment. That's around 152 beer cans, cigarette butts, candy wrappers, grocery bags, and assorted other scraps of civilization for each and every person in the country.

From Keep America Beautiful

152 pieces of litter.

If you have been around the Greenway in recent days, it's probably not hard to believe! This time of year litter is conspicuous: heavy spring rains and snowmelt wash trash from roadsides into the Greenway, and strong winds can blow trash out of bins that aren't secured, off passing vehicles, and out of nearby construction areas. Much of the tall grass and stems that may have kept the ground from sight has been flattened by those same winds, revealing piles of plastic, styrofoam, and aluminum.

What is to be done about all this trash? Well, first of all...pick it up! Join the SDNA Team Up to Clean Up event on Sunday, April 24 to help clean up the Greenway. Bring a bag on your walks around the neighborhood, or informally "adopt" a stretch of road that you notice looking trashy. Can you pick up 152 pieces of litter? Or maybe 304 pieces? How about 608 pieces?!

The presenters for the program, Jane Wilch, Recycling Coordinator for the city, and Beth MacKenzie, UI Sustainability Program Manager, offered suggestions for being involved beyond simply picking up trash, including helping to collect valuable data through an app like Litterati or Marine Debris Tracker, which can help scientists and policymakers understand where trash comes from and where it ends up, and hopefully develop solutions to prevent it.

But why should I have to pick it up? I didn't put it there.

Good point. The easy answer is, if not you, who? I, personally, can't tackle every person tossing a can out of their car window and force them to find a recycle bin. I can't personally issue citations to people who leave their dog's waste bags along the trail "to get on the way back" (but never seem to come back the same way). I can't march the developers out into the Greenway to pick up their construction debris after a windy day. But I can spend an hour or two every month cleaning up, just because it needs to be done.

But we're just individuals, it's the corporations causing this mess with their single-use packaging and shoddy, cheap manufacturing methods! Make them clean up after themselves!

Absolutely. That's why things like our Bottle Bill and other producer responsibility legislation should be a priority. The price of a product should include its entire lifecycle, from creation through use to disposal. States with a bottle bill recycle more than twice as many of their beverage containers than those without.

Have you been to festivals downtown, where the food vendors use compostable utensils and charge a higher price because those materials cost more? That's exactly backwards of what it should be. Imagine if the disposable plastic knives and forks, the styrofoam to-go clamshells and the plastic wrap all had to include the costs to recycle or landfill them in the up-front cost, instead of allowing those costs to be covered by our municipal waste systems. Would the compostable materials still seem more expensive? Would people make different choices if they had all the facts, and the products were priced accordingly?

And yet...the litter is out there. I can lobby for a better Bottle Bill, and for EPR legislation. I can make better choices in my purchases. But none of that beats the satisfaction of filling a few bags with litter and seeing a clean Greenway when I'm done.

Sun-bleaching on littered cans near the Greenway