Students in Marketing Field Studies class in the Tippie College of Business researched these multiple uses and images of the river through focus groups and meetings with community stakeholders. Based on their findings, they developed recommendations to encourage all users to interact with and communicate about the river in a sustainable way.

The Upper Iowa River is one of Winneshiek County's main tourist attractions, a crucial place for nature conservation, and a prominent feature of many homeowner's properties and lives. Because the river is valued and used in so many ways by so many different groups of people, it is often a site of contested images of nature and our relationship to it.