Lois Albrecht grew up on a small farm in southeast Iowa. As children, Albrecht and her siblings played outside often, which is where she gained her love for the outdoors.

Her passion for the outdoors directly transferred to her participation in many seed harvests for Johnson County’s Conservation Department.

The seasonal naturalist for Johnson County has been participating in these harvests for 15 years. Although Albrecht could not make it to the Nov. 12 harvest, which was the last harvest of the year, she still recognizes the importance of community participation.

“​​Harvesting seed is really nice because it’s a tangible activity. I mean, if you spend an hour, you’ve got a bucket with some kind of seeds in it, and it’s really enjoyable,” Albrecht said.

The Nov. 12 harvest was held at Williams Prairie State Preserve in Oxford, Iowa. Harvest Educational Specialist Kristen Morrow led the harvest and noted the importance of community members’ help.

“It’s super helpful to us to have volunteers. We’re able to bring in huge amounts of seeds, even if we have 10 to 20 people attend the event, it’s way more than what two or three staff members could devote on their own,” Morrow said.

Morrow and participating volunteers focused on harvesting seeds from bottle gentian. According to Northern Woodlands Magazine, this native flowering plant in northeastern North America attracts mainly bumblebees.

These seeds will be reseeded at a wetland in Cedar River Crossing to restore it, as it has struggled to thrive in the extreme drought Iowa has faced over the past couple of years. Morrow said harvesting the seeds of the bottle gentian provides a financial opportunity for Johnson County.

“It allows us to have seed from local areas, so the local genotype for the seed allows us as a conservation agency to not need to buy that seed, so we can spend less money on buying new seed,” Morrow said.

According to Iowa State University’s natural resource stewardship, prairie land cover in Iowa has been reduced to a tenth of a percent since European settlement.

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“Well, there is no way that we’re going to get back the 99 percent of Iowa which was once prairie because it’s almost entirely farmland, cities, shopping malls, and all highways now,” Albrecht said.

Johnson County Conservation is striving to preserve and restore prairie and wetlands in the area with the community’s help, Conservation Program Manager Brad Freidhof said.

Morrow said this process is also a small way of contributing to solving climate change. Prairie roots sequester a large amount of carbon and, by extension, store it in the soil.

“The more that we can continue to play some small role in mitigating the amount of carbon emissions that are in the atmosphere, the more we are contributing to solving the climate crisis,” Morrow said.

According to the Iowa Association of Naturalists, prairies provide food, habitats, and protection from predators.

“It’s important to preserve some examples of prairie throughout the state so people can understand what was once here, and it’s also important because it provides habitat for insects, reptiles and small mammals,” Albrecht said.

Freidhof and Morrow both noted the importance of protecting and restoring prairie lands to revive some of the beauty before European settlements.

“We’re trying to protect those minuscule postage stamp pieces of habitats so we can piece them together to build an ecosystem that sustains us all. Because our survival on this planet is all due to a few inches of fertile soil and rainfall that comes hopefully every year,” Freidhof said.