[MUSIC PLAYING] ANNOUNCER 1: This program was made possible by the generous support of-- [MUSIC PLAYING] ANNOUNCER 2: Great Southern Bank is committed to improving the places we call home by sharing resources, getting involved, and volunteering.

Learn more at great southernbank.com.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Community partner Wild Birds Unlimited in Springfield, featuring hummingbird feeders and advice for the backyard hobbyist.

Located in the Parkcrest Shopping Center south of the Campbell Avenue Footbridge.

Wild Birds Unlimited of Springfield bringing people and nature together.

[MUSIC PLAYING] ANNOUNCER 3: OPT member Jan Baumgartner supporting lifelong learning and storytelling in the Ozarks.

In loving memory of her husband, Gary Baumgartner.

[PIANO MUSIC] Missouri is a very unique state.

It truly is where the Eastern forest meets the prairies.

We have a lot of resources here, a lot of great outdoor resources.

This place is a treasure.

The Ozarks are amazing.

Worldwide, this has a reputation for beauty, and for our aquifers, and for our fishing and hunting, and for our lifestyle.

The diversity of plants and animals and the water resources that we have-- Missouri is a great place for the outdoors.

It's a great place for people who love the outdoors.

[PIANO MUSIC] When the first settlers got here, Missouri was a prime outdoors area.

And the reason is Missouri is truly where the forest meets the Plains.

You had an abundance of habitats.

In the southern part of the state, you had good clear streams.

So you had a lot of good things going on in the outdoors.

We're in the middle of the country, and so we have different ecosystems in different parts of the country that sort of overlap here.

We've got the Eastern deciduous forests that come into Missouri.

From the north and west, we have the prairies, and used to be very extensive prairie cover in North Missouri.

And from the south, we've got the Mississippi embayment, so the lowlands along the Mississippi River, with all the wetlands and all the animals and plants that grow in wetlands.

All of that converges in Missouri.

At one time in history, America was populated with Indigenous people, and the water was excellent.

Whole communities survived and thrived not needing to do really anything to their water.

Fast-forward-- we came in, we colonized, we changed nature.

And things just got worse, and worse, and worse.

A lot of our little towns, and even some of the big cities, are founded at springs.

And that's the case with Springfield and a lot of other cities in the Ozarks.

And then it wasn't long until the stream is flooding, and properties being damaged, and there are businesses like tanneries and things that are discharging into the river.

And there's lots of horses, and oxen, and things adding bacteria, pollution.

So it got bad pretty fast.

By the early 1900s, deer populations were declining.

Deer survey in the 1920s estimated that the deer population was down in the hundreds.

Wild turkey population was getting bad.

Again, unregulated hunting and habitat destruction really took a toll on Missouri's turkey population.

The wildlife had been depleted.

The fish were disappearing from the streams.

There was a lot of pollution.

Another thing that was going on, particularly in the southern part of the state-- a lot of landowners burned their land in the spring.

They thought it got rid of ticks and chiggers, and did some vegetative clearing.

But what it also did was create a situation where a lot of erosion was going on.

A lot of the vegetation that was holding the soil in place was getting into streams.

And also a lot of these fires got out of control.

In the early 1930s, it was estimated that about one third of Missouri burned every year in wildfires.

So there was several things going on in Missouri's outdoors that needed to be corrected.

Groups that were formed around the ideas of hunting and fishing got together and said, we've got to do something.

We just can't go on this way.

And so the result of that effort was the idea that we need a state agency whose responsibility was to make sure fish, forests, and wildlife were protected somehow from all these threats.

There was a citizen-led conservation effort by E. Sidney Stevens, who was a publisher in Columbia.

He was a newspaper publisher-- big outdoorsman.

And he, through his efforts and the efforts of some other people, formed what was called the Conservation Federation of Missouri in 1935.

The Conservation Federation of Missouri got, on the ballot in 1936, a proposal to create a nonpolitical conservation commission.

And that was approved.

It was approved by, I think, about a 71% margin, one of the largest margins ever.

And that shows how much Missourians care about the outdoors.

So the creation in 1936 of the nonpolitical conservation commission led to the conservation setup we have today.

It's called the Missouri model.

The result is a conservation department today that is highly respected nationwide.

[MUSIC PLAYING] One of the first things we did, as a conservation department, we shut down deer and turkey hunting in 1938 for the state.

The populations were just too small to sustain a population.

We trapped deer and moved them to other areas of the state.

Today, we have a population of deer that is over a million.

So remember, in the 1920s, it was just a few hundred.

Today, it's over a million.

Turkey populations were in serious decline.

We identified places where there were still wild turkey populations.

And so we trapped turkeys there and transported them to private farms and other private areas where those populations could take off and grow.

And they did.

And today, we have a turkey population somewhere around 350,000, 400,000.

And the third thing we did, and this was highly, highly innovative, is shutting down these wildfires-- turning the attitudes against this spring burning, which was really part of the Southern Missouri culture.

We had a vehicle called the showboat, which we drove across Southern Missouri showing fire prevention films to the populace.

FILM NARRATOR: More than 2 million acres of forest land in the state are now under cooperative fire protection.

Man has learned to value his forests.

He fights for them instead of against them.

The official foresters do not work alone.

The landowners work with them, both in reporting fire and fighting it.

Almost 600 wildfires were conquered last year through the efforts of the foresters and those working with them.

And you got to remember, in the 1930s, 1940s, depression-era Southern Missouri, seeing a film in general wasn't that common of an occurrence.

So it was a big deal just to see a film.

And it gathered people.

In the early 1930s, it was estimated about 1/3 of Missouri's burning wildfires every year.

By the mid to late 1950s, it was less than 1%.

So that was a conservation outreach effort that really made a difference.

I guess it all ties in together.

What's good for the land is good for the wildlife that's on the land.

You're right, Jim.

I am beginning to understand what the Conservation Commission is really trying to do.

Well, fellas, it's just a matter of cooperation.

The farmer, and the public, and the commission can get a lot done when they all work together.

I guess you're right.

[MUSIC PLAYING] [WILDLIFE SOUNDS] FILM NARRATOR: In many communities, once miles from good fishing waters, sparkling man-made lakes form new recreation centers.

These lakes are the result of cooperation between local citizens and the Conservation Commission.

In September of '68, I got a job with Missouri Conservation Department.

And at that time, they had just gotten a license on Stockton Reservoir-- 16,500 acres of land on the upper reaches of Stockton Reservoir.

They handed me a roll of aerial photos and said, go forward and do good.

And my assignment was to manage it for wildlife.

We were managing primarily for quail and rabbit was our goal.

But when you do that, you benefit songbirds, you benefit turkey.

The dam went in in '69.

When the dam closed, in like six months, we had a lake, you know?

[CHUCKLES] It was really surprising.

We got 16,500 acres for the public to hunt and fish.

We tried to do what we could to meet the public needs, but at the same time protect the lake.

Wildlife management around the area on Stockton is minor compared to the flood control and hydroelectric power.

And now, with getting water to Springfield, it goes into Fellows Lake.

Early '70s, when the "Clean Water Act" and the "Clean Air Act" came about, it was bad across the nation.

Rivers were on fire, and that got people's attention.

And those two acts were bipartisan and nearly unanimous.

And that was a driving force for many years to start improving our air and water quality.

And we've had tremendous, tremendous successes.

In 1976, the people of Missouri voted what's become known as the conservation tax.

That is, 1/8 of 1% of all sales tax in Missouri goes towards conservation.

Today, that's somewhere around 2/3 of our funding.

That was a resounding approval in the minds of Missouri citizens that we need this work to continue.

In the late 1970s, the water in Wilson's Creek was essentially raw sewage.

And I don't think at that time we even necessarily knew exactly how to really clean it up.

But we did as a community, and we did that proactively.

Watershed Committee of the Ozarks, now called just Watershed, was formed in 1984.

And the reason we were formed is our community's drinking water supply was having some real issues.

Fellows Lake was producing water that tasted bad and looked funny.

We were having algae blooms up there.

And it really shook people.

And community leaders got together and said, this isn't acceptable.

What are we going to do to preserve and protect our future water supply?

And there were several outcomes of those conversations.

And the formation of Watershed was one of those things.

And now, Wilson's Creek is basically drinking water quality, and the stream now supports smallmouth bass, a keystone species, meaning that everything underneath that in the food chain is in place as well.

We're a very large area of biodiversity.

There's lots of different habitats, especially in the Ozarks, where you've got everything from Shady North facing bluffs with ferns growing on them, to dry glades with collared lizards and prairie plants growing on them.

A glade is basically an open area where there aren't very many trees, and it's rocky, and it's wet in the spring.

So it's kind of functions as a wetland a little bit in the spring, but then by the summer it's very dry, and there are cacti growing, and it's very barren.

It's very hot and dry in the summer most of the time, and very cold in the winter, and wet in the spring.

And so you get flooding events and you get drought events.

The diversity of habitat types, the diversity of habitats above ground and below ground, from rivers to prairies, to wetlands.

And in the Ozarks, we've got the underground habitats of caves and karst topography that adds another dimension to the biodiversity of our area.

Karst terrain, a landscape of limestone which has these key features like sinkholes, and caves, and losing streams, it poses some really unique challenges for water quality, because the connection to our aquifer is so direct that it's really easy to get pollution into the groundwater.

And let me tell you, once you get pollution into the groundwater, it's really hard, and difficult, and expensive to get it out.

Pollution you create may actually not only pollute surface streams, but also pollute the groundwater, which may be your drinking water.

This is permeable to water.

And you really see it during a big rain event where, all along this exposed rock surface, you see little fingers of water coming out.

And similarly, underneath the level of the lake, there's also more springs that express themselves.

They don't seem until we have to drain the lake and do repairs.

So there is a vast cave system that underlies all of this area.

And that's why like when Will mentioned that it rains a lot, the whole hillside here just gushes with water, because it's all permeable.

It's all little capillaries of water that, when it gets to a certain point, it just pours out.

There's an underground river down there, underground lake.

There's blind crawdads.

It's not a scenic thing, but it's an important thing for the Ozarks to recognize that this is the world we live in.

We recognize that this particular spot is what we would call a karst laboratory.

You can see a karst window.

You can see sinkholes, the spring itself, little lake, the tumbling waterfall.

All of that is representative of what happens when you have a lot of rainfall in the Ozarks.

Where is it going?

It's going on the ground, but it quickly sifts through the shallow soil profile down into the rock and forms these amazing amenities.

So that means we can enjoy the beauty of the Ozarks, but we have to be very careful about what we put on the surface of the ground.

Karst landscapes are cool.

I mean, we have hundreds of caves in Greene County.

We have, of course, the springs.

This is Springfield, Missouri after all.

These are a thing that have attracted people to our landscape since the beginning of people on our landscape.

The cold water from springs is kind of a basic feature of our topography.

That influences the economics of the state as well as the ecology.

Trout are not native to Missouri, but there's a lot of trout parks in Missouri.

It's a big income-maker for the state in terms of trout fishing.

We are privileged to have that kind of supply of relatively fresh water right here.

We have such an abundance of water here in the Ozarks, we take it for granted.

This is precious.

It's valuable.

It's amazing.

A lot of people depend on it.

What we do on the surface influences the subterranean ecosystems and vice versa.

So one of the ways that it affects the surface is that all these springs contribute cold water to the streams of Missouri.

So you have a lot of cold-water-loving species that are found in those streams.

Things like the Ozark hellbender that are endangered in Missouri that live in cold, spring-fed streams, they're just so weird and so different than most organisms.

They breathe through their skin mostly.

And it's not always clear what all is going on and why their populations are dwindling.

The Missouri Department of Conservation has been involved with hellbender recovery in Missouri.

The issue with hellbenders is that we noticed that the population was declining, and there didn't seem to be any reproduction.

So we partnered with the St.

Louis Zoo.

And the St.

Louis Zoo is actually raising hellbenders in captivity, along with cooperation from us.

And then those hellbenders are being released into the wild.

So that is a an effort that seems to be experiencing some success.

And cavefish that live underground, which is just amazing to me to think about these little white, blind fish swimming around in the total darkness below our feet-- cavefish are usually small populations, very restricted in their range.

It would be very easy for one pollution event to wipe out one whole population.

So there's been a very concerted effort to protect those caves where the cavefish are found.

I sit on the board of Ozark Land Trust.

And recently, that organization purchased a cave opening in Perry County, where the endangered grotto sculpins are found, these little sculpin fish that live underground.

Now, we own the cave entrance, and at least we can protect the entrance to the cave.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has some caves that they own, and the Conservation Department has two.

So trying to control the entrance to the cave and maybe the pollution that might flow into the cave so that those populations can be protected.

Our understanding as a community is becoming so much more sophisticated.

We have the Ozarks environment and water Resources Institute modeling the Upper James River Watershed, figuring out where the pollution is coming from.

The city is doing sustainable return-on-investment modeling, figuring out what is the most effective way to spend our limited resources for the maximum impact on the things that matter the most to the community.

This is a sophisticated way to go about Triple Bottom Line approach of water quality, and we are actually a leader in the country on that.

We're one of only a few communities in the nation, given the permission, essentially, from the Environmental Protection Agency to do this.

We're looking at things holistically.

We're working together as a community.

In fact, we say partnership is in the water here.

Greene County, the city of Springfield, Ozarks Environmental Water Resources Institute, City Utilities, Watershed Committee, James River Basin Partnership, the Department of Natural Resources, Missouri Department of Conservation, we all work together on a regular basis weekly, and we all have shared goals.

We all have different niches in the ecosystem.

We have different ways to help each other, and we communicate really well.

So honestly, being a part of that is one of the great joys of this work.

So there's invasive plants that are here that are pretty much, like, they're everywhere, like the multiflora rose.

And then there's others that if I see them, we want to take care of them, like the privets.

Some of those are invasive.

In a healthy landscape native vegetation, for the most part, will control the invasive species.

Invasive species really thrive in landscapes that have been severely disturbed.

In undisturbed landscapes, the alien species have a much harder time competing.

We're looking at privets today.

That is a fast growing tree that's from China that is invasive.

This is privet.

This is one that I've noticed is being removed.

It's harder to find now, which is good.

They have a lot of berries.

Or, well, they're drupes, but.

They also form little thickets.

But they were originally planted as a shrub, a yard shrub.

So getting people to be aware that these plants are problems are problematic.

It' one of the big challenges.

This is bush honeysuckle.

It is an invasive species here in Missouri.

And this is something that we have been fighting here at the Botanical Center for many, many years, and are still fighting it.

Birds eat the berries and then spread the seeds all over the place.

And they're not nutritional for the birds either.

So it doesn't really provide a lot of benefit for wildlife, just because there's very low nutrition in these berries.

But this can get quite large and be difficult to control.

You drive down any urban corridor, and you see this green understory, yellow-green.

It's this impenetrable layer of bush honeysuckle that growth becomes so dense that you really don't get any young trees growing up.

So they're blocking out the sunlight and taking all the nutrients, and you don't get forest regeneration when it gets to a certain point.

We do have some native species of honeysuckle that are incredibly beautiful that I would recommend.

But non-natives, like Japanese honeysuckle and bush honeysuckle, that spread to natural areas take over.

And, again, they're very hard to get rid of.

Multiflora rose is another plant that is partially an annoyance because it's got prickles on it.

These are rose hips, so they produce a lot of fruit.

And one thing that the invasive plants tend to have is that they tend to all produce a lot of fruit, so the seeds get spread by birds and other things, and that makes them even harder to get rid of.

Bradford pear, oh my gosh.

You drive-through the Ozarks, particularly around Springfield.

You'll see vast blossoms of white, some of the earliest blooming trees.

And it looks beautiful, but those are all in invasive species that is actually successfully outcompeting our native oak, hickory and walnut forests.

So that's a species of concern.

They'll be covered with thorns, and they'll have these little brown fruit that aren't really good for anything.

And those will take over for us if you're not careful.

One of the plants that's been banned from being sold is burning bush.

So this is what it looks like in the summer, green leaves opposite, branching green stems.

And then in the winter or fall, it looks like this, the red leaves.

So it looks like it's on fire.

If they get into the woods, they will take over the understory, and you'll have-- and you?

Can tell in the fall, especially.

That they're there, because they'll be the only red-leafed plants out there.

Winter creeper is a vine.

It's related to burning bush, and it takes over by-- basically, it covers the ground, so the nice little spring plants like Trillium and things like that can't pop up, because it just covers everything.

And it grows up the trees, and you'll have a very dark-green forest, but only one species out there.

They tend to be green longer than other plants.

So if you go out in the spring, early in the spring, before anything else is leafed out, you'll find bush honeysuckle, winter creeper's already green.

You'll find multiflora rose.

Those will leaf out before all the native plants leaf out.

In the fall, they will keep their leaves.

They'll also produce tons of fruit.

Once they start producing fruit, it's really hard to stop them.

So really, the overarching problem with invasive species is they're a detriment to diversity.

Diversity is typically a metric of health for any community, whether it's a plant community, or a macroinvertebrate community, or a human community.

You need different people occupying different niches to have a thriving community.

The habitat for a butterfly is nectar plants for the adults and host plants for the caterpillars.

And if an invasive species displaces the host plant, or displaces the nectar plants, then that's a habitat change from the butterfly's point of view.

Habitat loss is huge.

I think we're also witnessing a mismatch between the animal species that live here and the food that they need.

Normally, over time, these are in sync.

So when a species of bird shows up, the food's there, caterpillars, say, from a tree.

But with climate change, that becomes mismatched.

Next thing, you know, both are suffering.

And we've seen that in the serious decline of bird species and insect species.

And that's a long-term problem because both of them are so important to our food supply.

The existential threat now hanging over all of those is this thing of climate change.

And what is that going to actually do to us here in the Ozarks?

I definitely see a wide range of flowering times.

I've been teaching for actually about 30 years now, and it used to be a lot easier to predict when we could go to a field site and see something in particular flowering.

Climate change has made things a lot more unpredictable, and I think the insects that pollinate things are probably also very confused.

Spring is coming earlier.

Winter is arriving later.

It's getting hotter.

It used to snow here quite a bit.

Instead of snow, we now seem to have ice storms, more violent windstorms.

I think that's what we're seeing in the weather, is just more violent storms, bigger floods.

I think the most important changes we're seeing in the Midwest are the ones that are going to affect us economically and personally, are in the precipitation patterns and amounts that we're seeing.

A lot of It's from the Gulf, and the Gulf is record hot.

It's been record hot for years.

And so you've got this big, hot body of water down there.

It's evaporating a lot of water.

Air currents, weather patterns, move that up into the Midwest.

And so we get all this warm, juicy, moist air that comes up here.

And then it gets wrung out as precipitation.

We've had some pretty interesting weather patterns the last few years in the summer.

We've had some intense periods of heat that have went on for weeks.

We've had intense rain at weird times of the years.

We've had windstorms.

We've had drought.

What I often talk about is this idea of the uncoupling of ecological relationships.

And in a simple way to think about it, just consider, you know, what happens if the flower blooms before the bee gets there.

It takes a long time for an animal to adapt to major changes, like temperature changes.

So it's not going to happen overnight.

And before it does happen, there's likely to be a loss of those species.

I feel like we're making progress, but our progress is linear, and the changes that are happening around us are more of an exponential.

There are natural variations in the climate cycle.

I'm a geologist by training.

We have reconstructed climate over hundreds of millions of years.

We know what the climate was on Earth when the dinosaurs were here, and we know it long before that.

We know that climate varies.

There's no question about that.

What's different about what's going on in the last 100 years, and really, a lot in the last 30 years, is the rate.

There's no time in the geologic record where we ever see, in all those hundreds of millions of years, there's no time where we see rates of change like we're seeing now.

It's never changed this fast.

The only reason that it's changing this fast is because of CO2 being released by the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, things like that.

That's the difference.

That was never happening in the past.

So it's really that simple.

When you look at all those potential damages and things together, it paints a pretty gloomy picture, which makes it all the more important that we try to address climate change and try to cut down on our greenhouse gas emissions as soon as we possibly can, because it could be a disastrous future for us if we don't.

Summers are drier.

Winters, spring and fall are wetter, which means it's harder to get field work done if you're growing row crops when it's wet in the spring and wet in the fall, when you're trying to plant harvest.

And then once you do get the plant in, the crop in, you're more susceptible to drought.

So it's affecting a lot of different parts of our economy, or our cultural economy, or personal, homeowners' insurance rates, things like that.

Our population is growing.

Our climate is changing.

There's more pressure than ever on water resources, so we have to work harder to keep it clean, to take novel approaches to sort of really accelerate the ways in which we address water pollution and keep our waterways clean.

We use a tagline around here, "clean water for life."

And that means some different things to us.

It means water for our lives.

It means water for all life, and it means water for the long term.

The more pure or clean that water is, the cheaper it is to treat, deliver, and supply to the community.

So it's a huge competitive advantage for keeping our waterways clean in that regard.

What we talk now about are things like climate resilience, where you start thinking about we may have to grow different crops that don't require that much water, because we may have bigger droughts or plants that can withstand flooding that we didn't use before.

So whether you're a farmer, whether you're a firefighter, or just somebody working in your backyard, climate change is going to have an impact on you and what you do.

It's not a political issue.

It's a human issue.

It's an underlying problem for all of humanity.

We're sort of destroying the foundations of food sustainability.

If we're going to have food in the future, and if we're going to farm in the future to produce food, we've got to keep the soil healthy.

It seems like what we're really having is an imbalance in the weather patterns, which is making it much more difficult to get in the field in a timely manner, to plant, to cultivate, to spray, to harvest different things like that.

And I can say the weather in Southwest Missouri has already been known to be extremely variable, some of the most variable weather in the country.

And here, climate change seems like it's making a bigger difference than it ever has before.

I'm a horticulturist, so I work with small fruit and vegetable producers in the Ozarks.

And today's farms are more environmentally conscious than ever.

People care about the land and they care about, run off into waterways, and they care about pollinators, but they really care about soil health.

So whenever we're growing plants, it all goes back to the soil, taking care of the soil, keeping it healthy.

While we have had a decrease in beneficial insects and pollinators and things like that, people's thought process on insects, and soil health, and taking care of waterways is changing.

We're changing the way we view the home landscape, the home farm, and making progress in the direction of protecting our natural resources.

There is a spectrum within farming that can go from land bankrupting to completely regenerative.

And here in the Ozarks, we have a lot of opportunity for that regenerative side of agriculture.

To me, regenerative agriculture should be the future of agriculture.

That should be the way we're going, because we've got to have food in the future, and we need for people to understand that if we're going to have food in the future, we've got to have soil and adequate water and all the things that go along with it.

We try to be very sustainable and regenerative on our farm.

To do that, we've implemented certain things, such as cover crops to hold in moisture.

We'll terminate the cover crop after we plant our cash crop, and the cover crop will serve as kind of a thatch to hold in the moisture, which should alleviate some of the drier, hotter periods later on.

We're trying to stay on the edge of the latest hybrids that have been bred with climate change in mind, that are going to be more resilient during longer periods of dry and heat, and the same thing with longer periods of wetness.

When you have a very limited window of opportunity, and you have periods of rain and rain and rain for weeks at a time, you're going to have more problems with weeds.

You're going to have fertilizer leaching out of the soil, and it's ultimately going to become more expensive to grow a good crop.

And lately, I've been trying to look at people that are farming in Texas and Oklahoma, because I feel like our weather patterns are kind of starting to mimic theirs a little more like, we're going to have moisture in the spring, and then we're going to be drying up in the summer.

So whatever we need to do adjusting planting populations or different crop rotations, whatever we can to try to prepare for these longer periods of drought and longer periods of sustained wetness.

When you're getting more intense, harder rainfall, you get more runoff.

That runoff is able to erode soils, erode sediment, and carry them into the stream.

So generally, what we would expect is, when we see these more intense rainfalls, we're going to see increased stream sediment and turbidity.

And that has impacts across the board on stream ecology.

If you're a bass fisherman, you know, those bass eat bugs that grow in stream, other critters that live in the stream or in the lake that they need to eat that are being impacted by those changes in water quality.

Flooding in the spring has become a big problem.

And it's not just the water that covers up the field, but we're getting driftwood and sand and gravel washed out in the field that we have to clean up.

This piece of ground was a feedlot.

OK.

20 or 30 years.

So it was nothing but mud and manure as far as you could see.

And when we put up a fence and we planted 6,000 trees, we began to restore it to its natural beauty, but also its natural function, which is to help filter the water that ends up in the river.

And when that water goes north and goes into Stockton, it's the drinking water supply for Springfield.

So anything we can do at this stage to keep the water clean means it's easier to keep the water clean when it gets delivered to your tap.

When you work with the Missouri Department of Conservation, plant about 20 different native trees and shrubs.

We've done a lot of work with the riparian corridor so that the space beside the river planting thousands of trees.

And that's been really cool to see the river become cleaner and see those trees begin to grow up.

As Springfield and the region grows.

With that comes impervious surfaces, concrete and asphalt and rooftops.

So we are getting better as a community at trying to get that water to slow down and get into the ground and recharge our aquifers.

You don't get filtration simply by getting water into the ground, but you do if it goes through soil and roots, and essentially an ecosystem which can help take out the nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, help filter out the quote unquote, "bad bacteria," the ones that may be pathogenic to humans.

Native plants can be a huge benefit when we think about conserving water.

And that can happen in many different ways.

So with a lot of our area waterways, we incorporate native plants, maybe on the banks of the waterways or near waterways.

And not only are native plants good for pollinators and things like that, but they can also be used for erosion control, for streambank stabilization, things like that.

They can really be a useful tool in some of those types of issues.

We're calling them things like nature-based solutions.

We're saying things like green infrastructure.

But it's really mimicking how natural systems operate in the first place.

Homeowners are more environmentally conscious than they've ever been, and they don't want to spray chemicals.

And so there's been a big focus on soil health with homeowners and pollinator protection as well.

So that's been a positive change.

As a self-proclaimed backyard naturalist, I like to talk about things that people can do in their own yards.

[BIRDS CHIRPING] That's a space that we have control over.

It's a place that we should enjoy ourselves when we're in our yards.

And for me, that means having a lot of birds and bees and butterflies around in the yard.

And so one of the best things you can do in that vein is to use native plants in your landscaping.

WOMAN 1: Native plants, once they're established, do so well.

You don't have to water them or fertilize them.

And the best time to plant them is actually in the fall, when they don't have the issues of heat and drought.

You're nurturing more than just plants.

You're nurturing birds, reptiles, animals of all kinds.

It makes your yard really interesting.

It's not boring.

So in the springtime, the first thing that blooms is the clove currant over there.

It smells heavenly.

And you'll see all kinds of critters all over the clove currant.

Sometimes with insects and pollinators, they're so small, we don't give them a lot of thought.

But they can really be a good indicator species of what's going on in the larger environment.

So if we see an area with a diverse population of insects, we know that that environment as a whole is probably healthy.

MAN 1: You can see just an immense amount of pollinators on it.

I see honeybees, I see native bees.

A lot of these organisms need native plants to survive.

WOMAN 1: So this is Cliff goldenrod that can just stick out, like you see here.

You can see the little berries that are forming on there, and that will feed some of the wildlife.

The more diverse your landscape is in the ways of plants, animals, the better landscape you have.

You hear over and over again about the importance of pollinators.

Something that people can do is increase the number of native plants they have in their yard, in their fields, in wherever they have property.

This is our native pawpaw tree, and pawpaw trees can be found throughout Missouri, often in creek banks and forested areas.

And not only do they produce an edible fruit, but this is the host plant for the zebra swallowtail butterfly.

The zebra swallowtail alone is enough reason to want pawpaw on your property.

And the fruit, you'll never find it in the grocery store because its ripeness period is too brief.

But it's a great tree, and people always ask about it when they come in here because we've got a whole wall of them here, as you can see.

We've usually got somewhere between 25 and 30 species of butterflies and moths in the butterfly house.

And that's a pretty good representation, maybe as much as a third or a half of what we could find right here in the gardens over the course of the summer.

One of the things they do is they keep the plants from running rampant and taking over because they're herbivores, and so they feed on the plants.

And then they in turn are food for birds and for bats and for reptiles and amphibians, not people so much, at least not here.

But they're definitely an important part of the ecology because they're at the base of the food chain feeding on the plants.

All the caterpillars, with very few exceptions, are herbivores.

And the butterflies, of course, visit flowers for nectar.

And they do a little bit of pollinating.

The moths probably do more.

Some moths are pretty effective pollinators.

Most butterflies probably are less important as pollinators, but there's a few specialties where they're the only pollinator.

One of those that comes to mind is Azalea.

Our native azaleas are pollinated by swallowtail butterflies.

And the flowers are specialized to use swallowtails as pollinators.

About a third of our crops, row crops, are pollinated by bees and other kinds of pollinators.

And so they're very important.

They provide what's known as ecosystem services.

They're providing real value to us.

I think people are starting to realize that their yard is part of the local ecosystem.

It's not separate from it.

And if your yard is just all manicured turf and non-native bushes and plants, you're not attracting much in the way of birds, bees, or butterflies.

WOMAN 2: This is our native fall aster, and they bloom this time of the year.

And you see bees on it.

This is a great plant for migrating monarchs because they are in bloom at the time monarchs are migrating through.

And as you can see, just beautiful flowers as well.

That's another thing about climate change.

Our winters have been more mild.

And even all winter long we'll see insects out on warm days, feeding and doing different things.

If you're just planting flowers for nectar, there's nothing wrong with using non-natives for nectar, as long as they're not invasives that get out and try to take over.

This is one of our favorite non-native pollinator plants.

This is lantana.

And lantana is native to southern areas, like Texas and Mexico.

It's a perennial plant there.

Here it is an annual.

It won't survive our winters.

And it takes our summer heat and drought.

And it has beautiful flowers that come in a lot of different colors.

We've started to talk about maybe covering the lantana over in the butterfly garden to see if we can get it through the winter because then we'd start off with bigger plants in the spring and have more flowers.

We're also pretty fortunate here in Missouri that we have a great native plant community.

We have organizations that promote the use of native plants, that educate about native plants.

We have a lot of native plant sellers that sell all around the state.

So access to native plants has definitely increased as well.

Native plants are great for so many reasons.

From a water perspective, you don't have to water them.

So there's no irrigation costs there.

They typically have great root systems, and that means a few things.

It means that they help water get into the soil and into the ground.

That's where we want it.

Those roots will essentially filter and increase the quality of the water by taking out nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorus.

If those are in the lake or the river, bad; in the roots of a beautiful native plants, good.

There's no such thing as waste water in a natural system.

Nutrients also are not pollution in a natural system.

And we can really look to mother nature to help us process those things so that they are not pollution, so that they are actually resources for us.

This beautiful little plant here is gigantea, which is also known as river cane.

It was widely known by the pioneers in the Ozarks because it was everywhere.

Every river bottom was populated by these guys and is a very useful plant for a lot of different purposes.

When it gets big, it turns into a plant big enough to make basket weaving materials for Natives, and it's also used as a blowgun.

River cane is one of the two native species of bamboo for North America.

It was virtually wiped out by early pioneers who fed it to their cattle.

So we're working with Missouri State University to plant patches of it along the river, to study the carbon intake, and eventually to propagate it all along the river as part of a bank stabilization program.

I'm really excited about the river cane research that Alexander Wait and his students have been doing over the years because that's an ecosystem that was devastated by European settlers.

And it was so special for-- like the Carolina parakeet, the really magnificent, beautiful bird that went extinct because it lost all that ecosystem habitat.

There's a big die-off of the ash trees.

These are very important trees, and we have about 900 in our property that are dying.

And so with Will's help, we've been systematically replacing the dying ash trees with something that's much more compatible, frankly, from a southern or warmer clime.

But because of the Earth warming, it's now more compatible to bring in bald Cypress trees.

So we've planted probably 1,000 of them.

Yeah.

Not only to anchor the soil and to provide tree cover and to suck carbon out of the air, but also to replace the ash trees that are dying.

MAN 2: They're called bald Cypress because they lose their leaves in the winter.

And here's another thing that's unusual about them.

They put up these things called knees, only when they're in wet areas though.

On dry areas they don't bother.

We think it has something to do with pulling oxygen back into the system so that the tree can respirate.

But we have to defend this tree with wire because periodic beaver populations, they come up from the river.

And they kill all the young trees around our lake.

MAN 3: Hmm.

We like the beaver.

We know they're part of the natural ecosystem.

But when you're a tree farmer, you have a different attitude about protecting your tree.

And of course, those roots are also helping hold the soil, which prevents erosion.

Sediment from erosion is one of the top three pollutants in local waterways, bacteria and nutrients being the other two.

They're beautiful.

They support biodiversity.

And we love to see the wildlife that those plants support.

I think there are a lot of people who want to protect the different natural areas, and it's becoming more and more popular to plant native plants.

And more and more people are getting aware of the invasive plants and the problems they cause.

So I think the more education we have, it is moving in the right direction, I think, because more people are becoming aware of the issues.

There's also a lot of people living in the Ozarks that are very much good land stewards and really care about the Ozarks.

I tend to say, well, the trees are someone.

The rocks are someone.

The ferns are someone because that changes how I think, and it makes my life much richer.

When you are othering someone or something, that's a first step towards being in a place where you can destroy them without conscience.

And we have othered the land in a way.

We're learning all the time.

We have to observe nature, work with nature.

The health of the land is the same as the health of the water and that connected spirit.

We have responsibility to be aware of what we can do and to be a part of how the land changes.

Farming has always been a big part of our enterprise as a family.

When Mike and I were young, we grew up on our grandparents' farm near Lincoln, Missouri, spent every summer.

So our parents, Dick and Ellen Chiles, found this particular place in an ad in the newspaper.

And it's been in the family and a project of ours ever since.

We're near the headwaters of the big Sauk River, which supplies water to Stockton, an important source of water for Springfield.

We've got some forests that are at least 150, maybe 200 years old.

Rolling hills, pastures, it has a little bit of everything that represents the best of the Ozarks.

If we make conservation gains, whether it's on public land or private land, we don't want to see those gains lost.

We don't want to go backward.

We don't want to slip because it's very hard to get land in permanent protection.

And so when we get it, we want to keep it.

Our family is planning on putting in place a land trust that would carefully control any future development on the farm.

We're also in the process of creating an arboretum.

An arboretum is a special park focused on educating people about trees, identifying them, appreciating some of the benefits, fruits, nuts, and just the aesthetic pleasure of being able to walk through a forest and just feel relaxed.

So many of the visitors to Rock Spring Farm are young.

School groups and researchers and people from the universities are showing that it's not just the purview of people who have experience, but it's the purview of people who have hope in the future.

They need a laboratory.

They need a place where they can see it in action.

Yeah, millions and millions of people come to Ozarks every year, not only to live but to recreate.

That is a special advantage that the Ozarks has in comparison to all the states around us.

WOMAN 2: There's so many people that come out to this park, and they just don't have access to nature.

It's just so cool to see families coming out with their kids and their dogs and enjoying the park on a nice day.

I've always said that Missourians get it.

By that I mean they get why our outdoors are so special.

They get why our streams are special.

They get why our lakes are special.

They get why our prairies are special.

They understand what is so special about our outdoors.

And so I think the greatest hope we have for conservation in Missouri, what gives me hope is the fact that our citizens have a great understanding of conservation.

[MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: This program was made possible by the generous support of-- [MUSIC PLAYING] WOMAN 3: Great Southern Bank is committed to improving the places we call home by sharing resources, getting involved, and volunteering.

Learn more at GreatSouthernBank.com.

[MUSIC AND BIRDS CHIRPING] Community partner Wild Birds Unlimited in Springfield, featuring hummingbird feeders and advice for the backyard hobbyist, located in the Parkcrest shopping center south of the Campbell Avenue footbridge, Wild Birds Unlimited of Springfield, bringing people and nature together.

[BIRDS CHIRPING] [MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: OPT member, Jan Baumgartner, supporting lifelong learning and storytelling in the Ozarks in loving memory of her husband, Gary Baumgartner.

[MUSIC PLAYING]