Driving through Eastern Washington today, you’ll see idyllic, rolling hills, with the same never-ending bunches of weeds and tufts of grass over patched-up highways as far as the eye can see.
Yet over a century ago, the landscape was filled with a bright, vast array of plants, weaving over and through the prairie side. That sight was destroyed by decades of wheat farming on depleted soil. On college campuses, the damage isn’t seen through mowed-grass lawns and leafy trees.
At Eastern Washington University, the well-manicured, green campus received a minor upheaval earlier this year in May, when EWU staff and volunteers spent the day reintroducing native plant species around the One Room Schoolhouse.
The Schoolhouse, a 120-year-old building, marks EWU’s beginnings as the first Washington institution for teaching instruction. Native plant reintroduction brings the area much closer to how it might’ve looked during the building’s construction — a small part of a wider goal to restore more land around the university to its pre-agricultural state.
The Schoolhouse’s native plantings are only the beginning of EWU’s climate resilience and biodiversity efforts, but are the most visible by far.
Beyond the Schoolhouse, EWU’s taken on the multidisciplinary effort of restoring native Palouse Prairie to what it once was. The goal of the project is to increase the biodiversity on campus through the use of native plants, more reminiscent of the native landscape, said Erik Budsberg, director of the sustainability initiative.
“(To) help support pollinators, biodiversity, lower reliance on irrigation, (and) watering,” said Budsberg.
It all started in 2019, with the 13-acre ‘pilot’ site of diverse native plant seeds near the Red Barn on campus — over the past several years, researchers have worked diligently to bring the land back to life, researching soil, reintroducing native species and attentively ensuring the native plants aren’t out-grown by non-native competitors.
Eventually, the pilot site will expand outward, with the end goal for 120-acres of EWU owned former agricultural land to receive the much needed makeover.
As for the prairie, the plain rolling hills next to EWU’s campus received a strategic round of six different types of grass seeds in fall of 2024, with the next stage being the planting of non-flowering grass plants in fall of 2025.
“Palouse Prairie is considered a critically endangered habitat, with less than 1% of the original habitat remaining due to development, primarily agricultural production of dryland wheat, chickpea and lentil,” said Erin Endres, a specialist in climate resilience at EWU.
“It’s a multi-disciplinary project that has encompassed researchers and students from geosciences, biology, education, (and so on),” said Endres. “The pilot allowed researchers to develop methodologies for seed diversity, species mixes, planting techniques — hand broadcast vs. drill seeded — and weed management.”
Indeed, the Prairie Restoration Project has served as stomping grounds for both on-the-ground work to restore the prairie habitat and EWU’s plans regarding landscape moving forward.
“The (Prairie Restoration) served as inspiration for the Climate Resiliency Master Plan. The One Room Schoolhouse was the first project (of the plan) and will inspire other native plant spaces across campus as spaces are improved and updated,” said Endres.
Among other biodiversity projects, EWU boasts a native-seed increase garden, designed to bring more native plants back to the region in a way they’ll thrive.
“The final outcome is that this project will exist for decades into the future. For anyone that hikes around the region, the goal is that the (Prairie Restoration Project) will look like the natural ecosystems around the region full of lupine, arrowleaf balsamroot, blanketflower, yarrow, other native plants in the sunflower species, among others. Students that attend Eastern thirty years from now will be able to see the restoration of a habitat that once existed on the land the university sits on 150 plus years ago,” said Endres.
