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Author: Carl Kurtz
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2014-04
Total Pages: 152
ISBN-13: 1609382404
DOWNLOAD EBOOKConcentrating on Iowa's tallgrass prairie, Kurtz also points his viewfinder toward the great variety of natural habitats in the eastern United States. Arranged chronologically throughout the year, the fifty-five color photos and their accompanying narratives rotate through the seasons like a nature film.
Author: Cornelia F. Mutel
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2008-03
Total Pages: 329
ISBN-13: 1587297477
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn The Emerald Horizon, Cornelia Mutel combines lyrical writing with meticulous scientific research to portray the environmental past, present, and future of Iowa. In doing so, she ties all of Iowa's natural features into one comprehensive whole. Since so much of the tallgrass state has been transformed into an agricultural landscape, Mutel focuses on understanding today’s natural environment by understanding yesterday’s changes. After summarizing the geological, archaeological, and ecological features that shaped Iowa’s modern landscape, she recreates the once-wild native communities that existed prior to Euroamerican settlement. Next she examines the dramatic changes that overtook native plant and animal communities as Iowa’s prairies, woodlands, and wetlands were transformed. Finally she presents realistic techniques for restoring native species and ecological processes as well as a broad variety of ways in which Iowans can reconnect with the natural world. Throughout, in addition to the many illustrations commissioned for this book, she offers careful scientific exposition, a strong sense of respect for the land, and encouragement to protect the future by learning from the past. The “emerald prairie” that “gleamed and shone to the horizon’s edge,” as botanist Thomas Macbride described it in 1895, has vanished. Cornelia Mutel’s passionate dedication to restoring this damaged landscape—and by extension the transformed landscape of the entire Corn Belt—invigorates her blend of natural history and human history. Believing that citizens who are knowledgeable about native species, communities, and ecological processes will better care for them, she gives us hope—and sound suggestions—for the future.
Author: John Pearson
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2009-10
Total Pages: 119
ISBN-13: 1587298813
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPhotographers Linda and Robert Scarth have an incredible eye for that magic moment when small becomes beautiful. Matched with patience and skill, their eye for magic produces dazzling images of Iowa nature up close. Revealing the miniature beauties hidden among the patches of prairie, woodland, and wetland that remain in Iowa’s sadly overdeveloped landscape, the seventy-five color photographs in Deep Nature give us a breathtaking cross section of the state’s smallest inhabitants. The Scarths’ close-up images of showy orchis and northern monkshood, great spangled fritillary and painted lady, red-breasted nuthatch and eastern wood-pewee, ornate box turtle and gray treefrog, big bluestem and cotton-grass, and many other natural wonders look more like paintings than photographs. Beginning with an iridescent fly hovering over a neon-purple fringed gentian and ending with their iconic image of coneflowers refracted in dewdrops, they have created a sparkling jewelbox of images that will make us look at the small world around us with renewed appreciation. Attending to the small things in the fabric of nature is the Scarths’ source of artistic inspiration. Taking Walt Whitman’s “every leaf is a miracle” as their beginning, they celebrate not only each leaf but each feather, insect, dewdrop, flower, lichen, and intricate organism in the evolving web of life.
Author: John Hay
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2007-08-15
Total Pages: 222
ISBN-13: 160938010X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOriginally published in 1969, In Defense of Nature is an eloquent and prescient plea on behalf of the natural world. Devoid of sentimentality yet lyrical and deeply moving in its portrayals of our despoliation of nature, Hay’s classic work is now available to a new generation of readers.
Author: James J. Dinsmore
Publisher:
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 272
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIowa has been changed more than, perhaps, any other state. We can mourn the disappearance of the bison and mountain lion while we marvel at the recent success of the wild turkey and white-tailed deer. Listening to James Dinsmore tell the story of wildlife in Iowa can open a window onto the future as other areas of our planet are increasingly altered by humans.
Author: Jean Cutler Prior
Publisher:
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781587296178
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOne of the joys of midwestern living is the variety brought by the changing seasons. This lyrical text looks at a year through a daily appreciation of the chirping, blooming, singing details of Iowa's natural world.
Author: Pavel Cenkl
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2009-11
Total Pages: 209
ISBN-13: 1587297140
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis Vast Book of Nature is a careful, engaging, accessible, and wide-ranging account of the ways in which the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire---and, by implication, other wild places---have been written into being by different visitors, residents, and developers from the post-Revolutionary era to the days of high tourism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Drawing on tourist brochures, travel accounts, pictorial representations, fiction and poetry, local histories, journals, and newspapers, Pavel Cenkl gauges how Americans have arranged space for political and economic purposes and identified it as having value beyond the economic. Starting with an exploration of Jeremy Belknap’s 1784 expedition to Mount Washington, which Cenkl links to the origins of tourism in the White Mountains, to the transformation of touristic and residential relationships to landscape, This Vast Book of Nature explores the ways competing visions of the landscape have transformed the White Mountains culturally and physically, through settlement, development, and---most recently---preservation, a process that continues today.
Author: Kathleen Woida
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2021-05
Total Pages: 257
ISBN-13: 1609387503
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 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.
Author: Rebecca Conard
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781609387136
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 1920, Iowa dedicated its first two state parks. In the century since, the Iowa State Parks system has evolved into a broad array of lands and waters that represent a legacy of tireless stewardship. Iowa State Parks commemorates the origins of our state parks and the riches they offer in the present. The photo essays at the heart of this book feature the artistry of well-known nature photographers such as Carl Kurtz, Brian Gibbs, Don Poggensee, and Larry Stone. The images help tell the stories of Iowa's state parks, recreation areas, preserves, and forests. A historical overview sets the stage, followed by essays on key aspects of our park system.
Author: James J. Dinsmore
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2023
Total Pages: 295
ISBN-13: 1609389255
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"This book tells the recent story of Iowa's wildlife from recovery and restoration to disappointing declines. During the pandemic, the number of visitors to state parks, wildlife areas, and other natural areas has increased greatly. For many, this is a new experience. This book will provide them with a reliable source of information about many of the animals that they are now seeing. Much has changed with Iowa's wildlife in the past 30 years. Some species like 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. The goal of this book is to provide an up-to-date, scientifically based summary of changes in the distribution, status, conservation needs, and future prospects of about 60 species of Iowa's birds and mammals whose populations have increased or decreased in the past 30 years. Emphasis is given to several species that have experienced significant growth, some that show signs that they may experience future growth, and a few whose long-term future in Iowa is in jeopardy. This book is not an update of James and Stephen Dinsmore's earlier book, A Country So Full of Game, which discussed Iowa's wildlife up to about 1990. This is an entirely new book, discussing what has happened in the years 1990-2020. For species covered in the earlier book, only a brief discussion of earlier years is provided to connect the new material to what happened earlier"--
