March is not only Iowa History Month, but also Women’s History Month!
While women have not always had recognition for their efforts, they have been involved.
Ada Hayden, 1884 – 1950
Photo from the Ada Hayden Collection, Iowa State University Library Digital Collections
One of the most well-known women in Iowa Conservation, Ada Hayden, was born in 1884 and grew up on a farm as an only child. Her home was in Franklin Township in Story County. She attended Iowa State College, which was later renamed Iowa State University. In 1908, she received a bachelor’s degree in botany. After receiving her master’s in botany from Washington University in 1910, she moved back home and worked toward getting her Ph.D from Iowa State College. In 1918, she was the 1st woman and 4th person overall to recieve a doctorate from ISU.
This was only the beginning of her passion for prairie. After her Ph.D, she worked as an assistant botany professor at ISU. In 1934, she became the curator of the herbarium on campus. She concentrated on prairie plants and is said to have created “possibly the best published native flora survey… of any part of Iowa”. She added over 14,000 specimens to the herbarium, many of which were from her family land.
In the 1940’s she began focusing more on prairie preservation. This however, is far from the first time that she thought about saving prairie. In 1919, she wrote an article about the importance of setting aside prairie for permanent preservation and research. She believed that prairie preserves serve as a living museum and field lab for scientists. In 1944 she helped write a report identifying areas of perservable prairie in Iowa.
In 1950, at the age of 65, she died of cancer. Today, there is a beautiful prairie and park in Ames, IA, named after her.
Herma Albertson Baggley, 1896 – 1981
Herma was born in Inwood, Iowa, on October 11th, 1896. She attended the University of Idaho and, while there, received her bachelor’s in botany with a minor in philosophy in 1921 and a master’s in botany in 1929. Over the summer in 1929 and 1930, she worked at Yellowstone National Park, giving talks about Old Faithful. Her entertaining and informative talks would draw in hundreds of people. Because of these talks, in 1931, she became the first woman to become a full-time naturalist with the National Parks Service. She helped design the first trail to Old Faithful, and in her 7 years as a naturalist, she wrote over 20 articles and coauthored Plants of Yellowstone National Park with Walter B McDougal. She also advocated for better living conditions for Park empluees and their families. She argued that improved housing and more benefits would help recruit better-qualified staff.
Kathryn “Kitty” Hach-Darrow, 1922 – 2020
While not Iowa-born, Kitty did a lot of good work in Iowa. While attending Iowa State University, she met her husband, Clifford C. Hach, and they married in 1943. While working in a water treatment plant, Clifford had the idea for a simplified method of analysis that would allow workers to treat water with powdered formulas rather than the heavy chemical solutions they were using. In 1947, they co-founded the Hach Chemical Company based on this idea. They bought an acre of land in Ames, IA, to build their plant on. They also lived in an apartment on the plant with their 3 children.
As municipal standards for drinking water evolved, Kitty recognized the importance of water plant operators as a market and the need to work closely with them to provide long-term customer service. This drive for excellent service led to her creating a direct mail marketing campaign where she flew a plane with product directly to municipalities of all sizes. While operating this campaign, she flew over 7,000 hrs and became a part of the Ninety-Nines, an international group of women pilots.
In 1957, the Hachs won the American Water Works George Warren Fuller Award for distinguished service in the water supply field. In 1978, they moved their headquarters to Loveland, CO.
Kitty was known as an accomplished pilot and one of the top women business owners. She was also the first woman director of an international non-profit focused on better water quality, the American Water Works Association. Afterward she served on many AWWA committees, including the President’s Advisory Council.
These are only a handful of intelligent, caring, and passionate women who have helped shape today’s conservation. Without them and many others, we may not be where we are today. So thank you to the women of the past, who have paved the way for others. Without your struggle, roughly half of the population would not have the choice to be naturalists or conservationists.
On St. Patrick’s Day, I gave a talk for the Izaak Walton League explaining why lakes and rivers turn green and how the assessment process works and why so many waters get stuck on the impaired list. Here is a recording.
Update on nitrate and drinking water
The last time the Iowa DNR submitted a list of impaired waters to the EPA, there was a dispute about six stretches of river that supply drinking water to Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, and Ottumwa, and used to supply water to Oskaloosa. The DNR claimed that the drinking water standard for nitrate should be evaluated using a 10% threshold, but even with this interpretation, two of the rivers failed to meet the standard this time. This chart shows what all the fuss is about.
An Act requiring the Department of Natural Resources to identify specific animal sources of pollutants to a water of the state when determining the water’s inclusion on a list of impaired waters.
Thankfully, the bill did not make it through the second funnel. While it’s useful to know where bacteria is coming from, DNA testing is expensive and should be done after a problem has been identified.
Finding clean waters
I am sometimes asked where to go in Iowa to find clean water for paddling, swimming, floating in an inner tube, or just letting the kids splash and catch crayfish in the creek. A map or list of impaired waters is not very helpful for this, because the waters that aren’t included might be clean, or they might not have been assessed. So I made an interactive map, color-coded to show which lakes and rivers met or exceeded the primary and secondary contact recreation standards, in the last four recreational seasons.
The Fine Print
If you explore the Impaired Waters List and the rest of the assessment database, you will likely run across some things that don’t make sense. I share your frustration! This pair of short videos from our “Clean Water Act: 50 Years, 50 Facts” series contrasts how Section 305(b) and 303(d) of the Clean Water Act should work in theory, and how it can go wrong in practice. However, I continue to see improvements in the assessment database (ADBNet) and water quality database (AQuIA) and want to express my appreciation to IDNR for the data they collect and their efforts to be make it available to the public.
March is Iowa history month and that’s a good opportunity to dust off some material from the archives to share the history of lakes in Iowa, some lost and some found.
Iowa has just 34 natural lakes remaining, most of them located in northern and central Iowa, which was covered by the last advance of ice sheets 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. The examples I will use are from Hamilton County, where naturalist Thomas MacBride had this to say:
“None of the lakes hereabout are very deep. They are all marsh-like, only distinguished from a thousand marshes by the courtesy of the pioneer who called them lakes to suit his fancy, recognizing their greater width and possibly, in some cases their bluffy shores.”
-Thomas H. MacBride, Geology of Hamilton and Wright Counties (1910)
Residents of Hamilton County should recognize one of the lakes on this 1875 map. Little Wall Lake is a popular spot for swimming, fishing, and motor-boating. At 249 acres, it’s plenty big enough to call a lake but only deeper than a marsh because of regular dredging. The lovely cabins for rent from Hamilton County Conservation were built from Iowa-sourced white oak logs as part of a Prairie Rivers of Iowa forestry and economic development project in 2013!
However, the 1,300 acre Lake Cairo and 870 acre Iowa Lake disappeared shortly after A.T. Andreas’s atlas was made. You can still see the shoreline of Lake Cairo on LiDAR, as well as the ditches (Rahto Branch and Ditch 71) built to drain it. Lost Lake Farm, a dairy located on the north “shore”, is named as a nod to that history. They employ rotationally managed grazing practices that build soils and protect water. I got to see this in action as part of Watershed Management Authority field trip in 2018; here’s a photo of the cows making a beeline for the tall grass after the fences are moved!
The scale of the drainage work is impressive, especially given the technology available at the time, and was just one of many such alterations that built up Iowa’s agricultural economy. In this case it made farmable over 1000 acres of Blue Earth muck loams with a corn suitability rating of 63 to 66. However, even at the time, there were disputes about how to balance public and private interests. To learn more about the history of drainage, I recommend a presentation by Joe Otto, recorded on Iowa Learning Farms.
The balance shifted as cropland became abundant and natural areas became scarce. In 1920 (partly at the urging of Thomas MacBride, quoted above) Backbone was dedicated as Iowa’s first state park. The Civilian Conservation Corps built a low dam on the Maquoketa River to form Backbone Lake in the 1930s and since then over 100 other lakes have been created in Iowa for public use by damming streams or by digging quarries and borrow pits.
In 1919, Iowa’s first county park was established in Hamilton County, not far from Lake Cairo, and Briggs’ Woods Lake was created sometime in the late ’60s by damming Terwilliger Creek. There are some more log cabins at this park, also built with the help of my former colleague Mike Brandrup. The porch is a good place to watch the lake and reflect on the complicated history of Iowa’s land and water!
For the past few months, Rick and Dan have been dipping nitrate test strips when we collect water samples for the lab. We have confirmed that the reaction is temperature-sensitive, causing nitrate test strips to under-estimate nitrate concentrations in winter. Accuracy can be improved by testing a water sample in a warm car, or by allowing an extra 30-60 seconds for the color change, but for best results, follow Heather Wilson’s advice, reprinted below:
“Hach (the manufacturer of the test strips included in your Nitrate Watch kit) says that sampling will be most accurate when the sample temperature is between 20 and 25° C (68 to 77° F). These ideal temperatures are easy to obtain indoors, but much more uncommon outside.
If you are concerned about cold weather impacting your nitrate readings, we recommend collecting your sample in a clean container and allowing the water to come to room temperature before taking your nitrate reading. Make sure to rinse the container three times with water from the water source you are sampling to ensure that no residual water from past samples remains.”
-Heather Wilson, Midwest Save Our Streams Coordinator, Izaak Walton League
The Driftless Water Defenders launched a social media campaign last summer calling for the end of Iowa’s #NoSwimEra. It’s a catchy slogan, and timely. 2025 was an especially bad year for recreational water quality. The Iowa DNR tests for E. coli (an indicator of poop in the water) and microcystin (a toxin produced by algae) at 41 beaches at state parks, every week between Memorial Day and Labor Day. If you had picked a beach and weekend at random for a family outing, there is a 1 in 4 chance you would have encountered a “Swimming Not Recommended” sign when you got there. Over the past 25 years, the number of microcystin advisories has fallen but the number of E. coli advisories and the number of beaches affected has increased.
Iowa’s water quality problems aren’t unique, but they are a lot worse than some of our neighbors. I analyzed 2025 E. coli data from Wisconsin beaches and found that 11% of the water samples had high enough E. coli levels to trigger an advisory (235 CFU/100mL), versus 24% in Iowa. 3% of Wisconsin beaches had average E. coli levels high enough to violate water quality standards (a seasonal geometric mean of at least 126 CFU/100mL), versus 25% of Iowa beaches.
Some of the advisories are posted at lakes where there has already been a lot of public funding invested in lake restoration and in voluntary soil conservation projects in the watershed, so don’t think we can solve this problem with more of the same. At Lake Darling, the work seems to have been undone by an expansion of the hog industry. At the Lake of Three Fires, the work seems to have been undone by conversion of pasture to cropland, motivated by the Renewable Fuel Standard. We need to take a hard look at how state and federal policies allow or even encourage farming practices that foul our lakes.
However, I follow the data where it leads, and it doesn’t always lead to a hog barn. Here is my latest summary of E. coli data collected by the water monitoring program in Story County. Hickory Grove Lake has been well-studied by the DNR, and both DNA markers and transects point to Canada geese on the beach, not livestock in the watershed. College Creek is usually our worst stream on days when it’s flowing, and it has an urban watershed. A large fraction of the bacteria in West Indian Creek came from an old sewage treatment plant that was just replaced this year. DNA testing of water from Ioway Creek showed that human waste is present. We’ll be doing more testing in 2026 to confirm this and narrow down the sources, including a volunteer event in early summer. Donations also help support our monitoring and education efforts!
Some people are afraid to dip a toe in any lake or river in Iowa, and their No Swim Era goes back decades. That’s a shame. Even in a bad year, it’s possible to find clean water for recreation. For example, I took my daughter and her friend swimming and paddleboarding at Peterson Park, a Story County-owned beach where E. coli counts never exceeded the double digits. I joined Iowa Project A.W.A.R.E. to canoe and clean up trash on some scenic stretches of the Upper Cedar and Shell Rock Rivers, which averaged 69 and 45 CFU/100mL for the season–the standard is 126. I’ve updated this interactive map to help you find others.
The new Currents of Change report has some good tips for minimizing your risk of a waterborne illness when recreating in waters of poor or unknown quality. I regularly go in Ioway Creek, which I know to have poor water quality, but pack hand sanitizer and do my best to keep my head above water. I dunked my head in the Winnebago River (which was muddy and hadn’t been tested recently) multiple times during a whitewater kayaking class, but wore nose clips. I stay out of green water but otherwise am comfortable with a certain amount of risk to be able to enjoy the outdoors. But that’s just making the best of a bad situation. No Swim advisories have gotten way too common, and we need to work together to clean up our water and end that era!
When the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve, nitrate in the Raccoon River was once again above the drinking water standard, closing out a bad year for water quality in Iowa. Below, I’ve compared this year’s nitrate levels to long-term averages at sites in Iowa DNR’s Ambient Stream Network with at least 20 years of data to get a sense for where and when nitrate was highest and what was unusual about 2025.
To understand these patterns, it’s important to remember that 2025 was not a uniformly wet year. Heavy rains in July broke or came near to breaking some records and caused flash flooding in many communities. These rains also raised the water table enough to keep drainage tiles flowing into into the fall. However, most of the state received less than average rainfall from January through May and from August through December. In a band from Ames to Charles City, that works out to a much wetter year than normal. In other parts of the state, like Dubuque, Ottumwa, and Red Oak, that works out to a much drier year than normal.
Nitrate was much higher than normal in the Boone River, Skunk River, and many others in northern and central Iowa, especially in July and August. Nitrate was within 1 mg/L of the long-term average for the Nishnabotna and other rivers in southern Iowa and for the Rock and Floyd Rivers in northwest Iowa. In the table below, red indicates nitrate was higher than average, blue is lower than average, and white is close to the long-term average.
There are some unusually high readings (25 mg/L in the South Skunk River in January) and unusually low readings (3.3 mg/L at Beaver Creek In July) that may have been collected during a storm or other event that is not representative. This is a limitation of monthly grab samples and one reason why maintaining Iowa’s network of real-time nitrate sensors is important. The Ioway Creek sensor was removed at the end of 2024, but the pattern I documented here here (a quick flush of low nitrate surface runoff followed by a gradual release of high nitrate drainage water) happened over and over, in many places in 2025. These kinds of leaks can be avoided with changes in cropping systems and land use, reduced with better nutrient management and cover crops, or intercepted and treated with saturated buffers and wetlands, but we’ll need a lot more of them to prevent another bad year like 2025.
