Scientist Chris Helzer has studied prairies for more than three decades.
But he hasn’t always loved these landscapes the way he does now. Though he often spent weekends exploring the outdoors while growing up in the Nebraska panhandle, prairies weren’t top on his family’s list of destinations.
“We would drive through miles and miles and miles of prairie to get to a lake to go fishing and some trees to camp under,” Helzer said.
He came to associate nature with trees and imagined becoming a forest ranger someday. That goal changed in college.
“I had a friend that came up to me and asked me if I ever thought about prairies,” he recalled. “I said – ‘Not really.’ And he pointed out that that was a weird thing, because we were both in a state where grasslands were the dominant ecosystem.”
This chat ultimately spurred Helzer toward a career in prairie ecology. Today he works for The Nature Conservancy in Nebraska and oversees the management of grasslands at places like the Niobrara Valley Preserve, one of the Conservancy’s biggest preserves in the U.S.
He’s also a photographer who recently wrapped up his second full year visiting and photographing the same single square meter of restored tallgrass prairie over and over again to make a point: Prairies are complex, vibrant places teeming with diverse forms of life.
Listen to Helzer tell the story of his Square Meter Photography Project on the podcast Up From Dust.
But his childhood illustrates something. Even on the Great Plains, it’s common for people not to pay much attention to grasslands.
Grasslands once covered nearly one-third of North America. Most of that is gone and what remains continues to shrink. The U.S. and Canadian Great Plains lose a couple million acres of it annually, in particular to make room for more crops, such as corn and soybeans.
Conservationists and others who want to save prairies face an uphill climb.
Part of this work includes raising the public profile of a threatened ecosystem that gets a fraction of the public attention devoted to popular vacation landscapes, such as forests, lakes and oceans.
That’s part of the motivation behind Helzer’s dedication to public communication about grasslands, including through his photography that captures the beauty of this ecosystem.
Sometimes that means sweeping vistas — lightning striking near the Niobrara River or a herd of bison surrounded by rolling hills.
Other times, it means taking ultra-closeups of the smaller creatures.
“A lot of my photography of insects, I try to show the face,” he said. “I often take it from the face forward — like they're looking at the camera. Because I think that makes insects especially more relatable.”
These portraits and his other photography can be viewed on his website, The Prairie Ecologist.
One of his projects that best showcases prairie life on this intimate scale is the Square Meter Photography Project.
The project proved that a patch of land barely bigger than three-by-three feet contained enough to surprise and mesmerize a seasoned ecologist who had already spent decades getting to know the flowers, grasses and critters of North American prairies.
Photographing the plot regularly turned into “an obsession that I didn’t see coming.”
“When I wasn't at my plot,” he said, “all I could think about was what I was missing — because something was happening at my square meter plot and I wasn't there to see it.”
At one point, he watched a small lynx spider guarding her eggs day after day.
“Eventually all the eggs hatched,” he said. “Then I was surrounded by these tiny, tiny, tiny little pin-prick-size spiderlings hanging from threads of silk from flowers and stems and crawling around and blowing through the air.”
Though grasslands are threatened, Helzer takes an optimistic view. He sees potential to bolster the continent’s remaining prairies by reverting more land to native grass and flowers.
“While it doesn’t recreate what was lost exactly,” he said, “we can pick, strategically, places where we have a couple of prairies that are relatively close to each other.”
The goal is to restore some of the native vegetation between those larger remnant prairies, to connect the populations of living things.
“Species can move across back and forth between those prairies,” he said. “You have larger populations, which are easier to keep around.”
Helzer’s photography from that single square meter of land in Aurora drives home the value even of small restorations.
The plot is located in a field of grasses and wildflowers less than 10 acres in size. Yet he has photographed hundreds of species of plants, animals and fungi there.
After his first year of photographing the plot, University of Iowa Press published a collection of his photos and reflections on the experience.
Prairies can help process fertilizer pollution that escapes cropland. They also support healthy pollinator populations and keep carbon locked underground instead of in the atmosphere.
But the way Helzer sees it, piquing the public’s curiosity takes more than laying out the facts about the ecological importance of these landscapes.
“I don’t think it makes sense to start out by saying, ‘Hi, I’m Chris. Let me tell you about prairies and why they’re important for carbon sequestration and filtering water.’ Like everybody's gonna go to sleep.”
It’s why he leads with the beauty and diversity of life in these spaces.
“Then they're hooked,” he said. “And eventually you can say, ‘Oh, and by the way, prairies also help us have clean water. Isn’t that great?’
Celia Llopis-Jepsen is the environment reporter for the Kansas News Service and host of the environmental podcast Up From Dust. You can follow her on Bluesky or email her at celia (at) kcur (dot) org.
The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio focused on health, the social determinants of health and their connection to public policy.
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