Prairie Vistas

Youngmeyer Ranch Reserve is a wide-open classroom and research area, its roughly seven square miles of land a haven for students and researchers alike. The reserve encompasses some 4,700 acres of the Flint Hills, which are one of the last stands of native tallgrass prairie in North America.

Privately owned by the Earl W. Youngmeyer, Jr. and Terri Youngmeyer Family Foundation, which granted access to WSU for research and educational purposes in 2014, the property gained permanent protection as a working ranch and tallgrass prairie reserve in 2016 when the foundation partnered with the Kansas Land Trust to place a conservation easement on the land.

Today, the reserve, which is not open to the public, is an active cattle ranch and a field biology research site for Wichita State. Researchers from multiple academic disciplines use the reserve and its Youngmeyer Field Station as a base for studies of the plants, animals, soils, waterways and overall ecology of the area.

Greg Houseman, biological sciences professor and field station director since 2018, notes that eight years after the Youngmeyer Trust granted research access to Wichita State, the trust funded construction of a research facility on a 10-acre section of the reserve’s conservation easement. The Youngmeyer Field Station opening in 2022. “Our main goal,” Houseman says, “was to construct a facility that would support the teaching and research of field biology. We also wanted a building that would fit into the landscape.”

In 2024, the off-the-grid, cast-in-place concrete structure was recognized for its functionality and design with a Small project Award presented by the American Institute of Architects. Crouching low on one of the differentially-eroded grassland slopes that characterize the Flint Hills, the 3,400-square-foot field station echoes the stratified stone layers of its surroundings and, with its horizontal lines of flow, encourages a viewer’s eye to sweep on across the larger landscape into the far prairie distance.

Photos and Video by Brayden Frazier

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