Welcome Tina!



Prairie Rivers of Iowa is excited to announce that Tina VanDyk has joined the organization as its new Business Manager and Development Director. In this role, she will oversee fundraising, donor relations, grant development, and operational management, contributing to Prairie Rivers of Iowa’s mission to conserve and restore Iowa’s natural, cultural, and historical resources.  

Four-lane Highway 30 finally connects Ames, Cedar Rapids

by Jeff Morrison

A 142-mile-long segment between Ogden and Lisbon is now an uninterrupted four-lane road. It’s been a long, long time coming — six decades, as a matter of fact.

The Water (Monitoring) is Wide

by Water Quality Specialist Dan Haug

Who is doing water monitoring in Iowa and where do you find that data? I’m sure this is a partial list, but the Iowa Water Summit has helped us get a clearer picture.

The Water (Monitoring) is Deep

by Water Quality Specialist Dan Haug

Our grant from the Water Foundation gave me an excuse to dive deep into a big statewide dataset collected by the Iowa DNR. Behold, my finest graph yet!

Pollinator of the Month:

Inland Floodwater Mosquitoes (Aedes vexans)

by Katelyn Rinicker, Pollinator Conservation Specialist

We are all familiar with the blood-sucking tendencies of mosquitoes, but did you know that they are an important pollinator too? Only females need blood (for egg laying) and the males feed from flowers with nectar. The sheer volume of mosquitos makes them an important pollinator.

The word mosquito comes from the Spanish word for little fly. Mosquitoes are a family of small flies of roughly 3,600 species.  The Inland Floodwater Mosquito is the most common mosquito species in Iowa.

Rebugging Our Community

by Katelyn Rinicker,

Pollinator Conservation Specialist

Insect populations have dropped drastically over the last few decades. Bugs are the building blocks of our environment and provide many benefits such as beautiful flowers, food sources, soil aeration, and more. We can help these little creatures flourish by rebugging our community.