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.”
