Chicago Wilderness: Work of the Science Team

These were my introductory remarks at a recent session at the Society For Ecological Restoration meeting in Madison, WI, on recent scientific research in the CW region.

Let me start this session with a vignette of Chicago from a couple of centuries ago – mainly to remind us how recent are the losses of the wild Midwest landscapes.

On August 19th 1833, that is 180 years ago, Colonel Colbee Chamberlain Benton (1805-1880) left Chicago with Louis Ouilmette, a young man of French and Potawatomi heritage, to inform local Indian tribes that their delayed federal annuities would be paid in September of that year.  At that time the white settler population was little more than 150 people.  A few years later in 1837 Chicago was chartered as a city after which growth was explosive.

On the night of August 24th the pair of travelers passed through some oak groves and arrived at a small stream in a little prairie in Southeast Wisconsin and they camped there for the night.  As night fell they heard Indians around their camp.

Benton didn’t sleep.  However, even if they had been “in danger of suffering from the power of… the tomahawk and scalping knives” it was not fear that kept him awake.  He remarked, in fact, there was something about his circumstances “so novel and romantic….that it dispelled every fear…”
So what kept Benton from his sleep?  It was the noise!  Some of the noise certainly may have emanated from the Indians who “mocked almost every wild animal.”  But also there were a loud wild chorus: unfamiliar birds called, as well as foxes and raccoons.  In the distance, wolves howled and the owls hooted in concert with the wolves.  The mosquitoes added their part to “the music”.  A sleepless, noisy, vaguely threatening night, and yet Benton declared that never before had he “passed a night so interestingly and so pleasantly…”
I tell this story, not to depress us, though it may indeed make us melancholy to contemplate the loss, but rather to allow us celebrate the work of a many many people in the Chicago region in recent decades who worked then, and work now, to arrest the degradation of our remaining wildlands, and to restore those systems where and when we can.

Many of these people and the organizations they represent have coalesced over the past decade and a half in the Chicago Wilderness coalition.  The term CW refers both 360,000 acres of protected natural lands in the tristate region surrounding Chicago……but the term also refers to the partners in the coalition – starting with 40 institutional members or so in 1996… but growing to 240 + institutional members in 2012.  I believe we just stopped counting!

The biodiversity goals of the coalition were stated in the Biodiversity Recovery Plan, a foundational document for the coalition, as follows: “To protect the natural communities of the Chicago region and to restore them to long-term viability, in order to enrich the quality of life of its citizens and to contribute to the preservation of global biodiversity.” Note that the goals are both ecological and social and the aspirations are global.

A major metropolitan environment might seem on first inspection an unlikely place to support a conservation project with global aspirations.  Yet in the early development of the Chicago sufficient land of a sort that Colonel Benton and Ouilmette witnessed, was set aside adjacent to and sometimes within the city so that, oddly perhaps, some of the areas of greatest favorability to T+E species are found close to downtown, more so that in the rest of the state.

Although considerable land is set aside nonetheless the health of this land is considerably challenged.  A few years ago expert panels in CW documented the status and changes in CW ecosystems which was then published as a report card.

The results are troubling.  My kids would have had to come up with some impressive excuses to explain these ones away. Our streams make an encouraging C- though!

We now have considerable insight into environmental factors driving the erosion of ecological quality: many of these being the usual suspects: hydrological changes, fragmentation, altered fire regimes, invasive species and so forth.

Chicago Wilderness works to achieve regional impact through four initiatives: Climate Change, Leave No Child inside, Greening Infrastructure and Restoring Nature.

All speakers today contribute to the work of the Chicago Wilderness science team. We are tasked with providing scientifically sound input to assist decision-makers in devising policy and action concerning the protection, acquisition, restoration, and management of natural areas.

We have also been developing research agendas identified those empirical unknowns that needed to be understood on the short to medium time scale in order to remove impediments to CW achieving its long term goals.

Over the past 5 years we have developed a network of sites for long-term observation on biodiversity outcome – we call this “100 sites for 100 years” (recognizing that this terrifies our funders!).  Secondly we have been investigating the institutional context for decision making processes in the CW region, attempting to find ways of linking our social and ecological research so that we can envision the region as a coupled natural ecological system.  We have also been investigating patterns of stewardship in the region.
Today we present summaries on many of our research initiatives.

Number of Species from Regularly Monitored Taxa in the Chicago Wilderness Region

Work in Progress - I will try to get this finalized in the coming days.... still waiting for feedback from several folks.... I should be able to break out the insects and add more arthropod groups.

	Total	Native	Non Native
Plants	2968	1829	1139
Mammals	50	47	3
Birds	423	_	_
Fishes	164	146	18
Reptiles and Amphibia	60	_	_
Insects	20000+	_	_
Molluscs	41	38	3
Earthworms	12	0	12

Notes:

Plants: Swink, F and Wilhelm, G (1994) Plants of the Chicago Region.  Indiana Academy of Science; personal communication G Wilhelm (Conservation Design Forum) (2013).  Mammals: Greenberg, J A (2002) Natural History of the Chicago Region and http://www.mammalsociety.org/mammals-illinois.  The three non-native mammals in the region are Norway rat (Rattus norvegicus), Black rat (Rattus rattus), and the house mouse (Mus musculus).  Birds: Personal correspondence: Judy Pollock (Audubon Chicago Region) Geoffrey A. Williamson, Doug Stotz (The Field Museum) and Sheryl DeVore (2013). Fishes:  Personal communication: Philip Willink (The Field Museum) (2013); Reptiles and Amphibia: Greenberg, J (2002) A Natural History of the Chicago Region.  Karen Glennemeier (Audubon Chicago Region) counts 12 species of frogs and toads in this number. Insects: The number of species here is an approximation made by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.  Since Chicago has a high concentration of natural area remnants relative the state of Illinois, there is a probability that it will have many of the states species.  However, the number is possibly a low approximation of that total species tally, as many of insect groups are poorly known. See: http://www.dnr.state.il.us/publications/pdf/00000679.pdf Molluscs:  Barghusen, L; Bland, J.; Klocek,R,(2010), A Field Guide to the Freshwater Mussels of the Chicago Wilderness, Field Museum of Natural History, http://fm2.fieldmuseum.org/plantguides/guide_pdfs/386.pdf.  Earthworms: Personal correspondence, Kristen Ross (University of Illinois, Chicago), Lauren Umek (Northwestern University), and Basil Iannone (University of Illinois, Chicago).  

*In many cases the data is for Chicago area is defined as the 22 counties that surround Chicago, including 11 in Illinois, 7 in Indiana, 3 in Wisconsin, 1 in Michigan.

Uncanny Landscapes: Leaving Behind the Landscapes of Childhood

Savanna/Woodland, Lake Co, Illinois

On a spring afternoon in the early years of this century I took a stroll through the East Woods at the Morton Arboretum near Lisle, Illinois. The trees were still leafless and the light was very fierce, so much so that I shielded my eyes with my hand, as if I was saluting my companion. Christopher, who walked beside me, and I were admiring the ecological restoration work that had been accomplished in that woodland over the years since I had been visiting. Dominated by oaks and sugar maples the East Woods is about five hundred acres, the same as Ashdown Forest in England where Winnie-the-Pooh lived. In fact, the part in which we rambled was about 100 acres like that part of Ashdown Forest around Owl’s house known to Pooh and his friends as the 100 acre wood.

As far as anyone can tell the vegetation composition of the East Woods now converges on that found in the woods more than a century before. After the mid 19th century the woodlands of the Chicago area came under the influence of the huge numbers of new settlers in the area, altering hydrology, modifying fire regimes, selectively logging trees, introducing alien species and so on. Undoing these influences and restoring representative woodlands to their pre-settlement composition is a goal of some Chicago-area conservation organizations. Marlin Bowles, an ecologist at the Arboretum, is an authority on reconstructing the region’s pre-settlement vegetation, doing so by digitizing early land surveyors’ notes and creating regional vegetation maps for the 1800s. Bowles and his colleagues have applied this information to the ongoing restoration work at the East Woods.

A Phenomenological Approach to Social Ecological Systems Research in the Chicago Wilderness Region – First Notes.

These are some thoughts on the results so far of work our group is doing on understanding governance structures surrounding ecological restoration in the Chicago Region.

Recently, I have been reading excerpts on the natural history of the Chicago Wilderness region recorded during the 19^th Century as collated in Joel Greenberg’s excellent volume Of Prairie, Woods, and Water: Two Centuries of Chicago Nature Writing (2008). 

One piece that especially caught my attention is Colonel Colbee Chamberlain Benton’s A Visitor to Chicago in the Indian Days: Journal of the Far-Off West.  There Benton described a trip that he and Louis Ouilmette, a young man of French and Potawatomi heritage, embarked upon from Chicago on August 19th 1833.  They left the infant city to inform local Indian tribes that their federal annuities would be paid in September of that year. On the night of August 24th the pair of travelers passed through some oak groves and arrived at a small stream in a little prairie in Southeast Wisconsin and they camped there for the night.  As night fell they heard Indians around their camp.  Benton hid beside a large tree and at Ouilmette’s suggestion he removed his straw hat since it was “a good mark to shoot at.”  Assessing the danger they found themselves in, Louis remarked that “there were occasionally some of the Sauks and Fox Indians wandering about in [that] part of the country, and from them [they] could not expect much mercy.”  Benton could not sleep.  Not necessarily because of the danger.  Rather, because of the noise!  Some of the noise certainly may have emanated from the Indians who “mocked almost every wild animal.”  But also there were unfamiliar birds calling, as well as foxes and raccoons.  In the distance, wolves howled and the owls hooted in concert with the wolves.  The mosquitoes added their part to “the music”.  A sleepless, noisy, vaguely threatening night, and yet Benton declared that never before had he “passed a night so interestingly and so pleasantly…”

Though some might conclude that what Benton and Ouilmette experienced was the Chicago Wilderness against which present times seem lusterless, species poor, and silent.  And though some of that may be so, nonetheless we know better to conclude it was nature pure and simple.  It was, of course, a social ecological system, one that at the time of the trip had been in place for centuries.  In those times it was the society of Native Americans being shaped by, and in turn shaping, the natural systems surrounding them.  By a social-ecological system we mean a system in which humans and non-human life forms are found in a spatiotemporally defined environment.  Moreover, the term is not simple an expansion of the ecological community concept to include humans which is a relatively easy matter.  Rather, SES’s include more of the mental tackle of humans in it; not the biophysical interactions merely.  Humans’ conception of nature, our consciousness of it, our desire to change it or leave it alone, for example; the human institutions that govern nature and the way in which nature influences human health and sensibilities are part of the social ecological system. These mental attributes are less easy to accommodate in our ecological theories than our trophic ecology for instance.

Ecologists are accustomed to thinking about parts and wholes.  The way in which the aggregation of components contribute to higher level structures – organisms, populations, communities, variegated landscapes, biomes, Gaia etc is theorized under the rubric of Hierarchy Theory or Systems Thinking.  Now we know it does perhaps a little injury to suggest that in this theoretical approach we can separate out a particular level in the hierarchy and analyze the level discretely, as if the other levels do not exist.  That being said, this is the basis for the subdisciplines of ecology: autecology, population ecology, community ecology etc.  But since each one of these subdisciplines derives from humans’ conception and abstraction of nature, the subdiscipline of ecology dealing with the integration of human mental processes into ecology has some sort of confusing meta-status.  Social-ecological systems research, in a sense, founds all ecology; that is, all ecology is already a type of under-inspected social-ecological systems ecology to begin with.  Our conception of nature and our recognition of the different ways of teasing apart the pieces of an ecological system to make them tractable for analysis can plausibly be done for everything except for the very mental processes decomposing the system, those very processes that represent the very “stuff” of social ecological research.

Now, ecologists are not the only ones interested in theories of wholes and parts.  Such a theory is at the cornerstone of phenomenology, a central movement in 20^th C continental philosophy.  This is provided by Edmund Husserl (1859 1938) as the third of his six Logical Investigations.  We don’t need to detain ourselves long with this (though the entire Logical Investigation may detain you for a considerable period – in fact, reading it is like striking yourself repeatedly with a dull mallet).  But let us just note that Husserl makes a distinction, one that ecologists don’t, between parts of wholes with quite unique properties.  Those parts that can be analyzed separately from the whole to which it belongs he calls pieces (populations, communities, tree branches, a horse’s head (ask me later!) and those parts that cannot be so analyzed.  He calls the latter part “moments”.  The color of a branch is a moment rather than a piece since it cannot be separated from the branch of which it is a whole.  Let skip ahead quite a bit and suggest there are several problems in science and philosophy that are exacerbated by confusing these distinct notions of parts. The notion of mind, the ecologically novel element in social-ecological ecology is not a “piece” clearly; it is a “moment”.  It can neither be extracted nor added to our analysis like adding an orange into a barrel full of apples.  The orange is always already in the apple barrel. 

It is perhaps not a surprise, then, that social ecological systems research has been difficult, slow.  We are used to working with “parts” and now we must address “moments”.  In our work exploring the ways in which variation in governance systems influences biodiversity and how biodiversity outcomes in turn influence our response to nature we are, in fact, doing something a little easier than putting the whole structure of consciousness back in the picture.  We are not looking for a pure science of essences as Husserl was.  Our problems at the moment are the pragmatic one of determining how two data sets should be analyzed together.  Environmental social science and ecology have developed as disciplines in response to the way in which we have broken down human-nature connections for the purposes of empirical investigations.  Surveys, sophisticated qualitative analysis of interview data, elucidation of rules, worm surveys, vegetation analyses, mite ordination are the ingredients but reassembling this particular Humpty Dumpty into a whole egg will be difficult.  But I am working with the finest of the king’s horses and the best of the king’s men.

  

Social Ecological Systems Then and Now: Chicago example

With a population of 2.7 million, Chicago is the largest city in the US Midwest and the third largest in the United States. The greater Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) to which Chicago belongs has a population of almost 9.5 million. The radical and rapid transformation of the landscape that has occurred over the past century and a half in order to accommodate a burgeoning population might suggest that Chicago is not a promising place to undertake large-scale conservation efforts. However, the region supports conservation programs that have received widespread local, national and international recognition.  That significant biodiversity protection occurs in Chicago is, in part, a consequence of the region’s climate and its evolutionary and ecological history. It is also the result of decisions made by people both before and after the settlement of the region by European and other non-indigenous populations (hereafter referred to as the “settlement” period).  These decisions resulted in land protected from development and/or maintained to preserve the characteristic biodiversity of the area.

When the contemporary situation in Chicago is compared against the description of the natural heritage of the region immediately prior to European settlement the differences are stark and from a conservation perspective seem somewhat discouraging.  One can barely walk for a mile across tallgrass prairie in Illinois compared to the possibility of a one hundred and fifty mile trek along the Grand Prairie back in 19th Century.  That being said, the landscapes of both eras each represent social-ecological systems – in the pre-settlement case the human agents involved being primarily indigenous Native American populations, more recently high populous and diverse urban population dominate.  Thus, both then and now human decision-making played a role in shaping natural components of the region. 

Journalist Charles Mann in his assessment of the impact of Native American peoples on the America found in 1491:New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus concluded: "Native Americans ran the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same.”  Now, we might quibble with the rather enormous license that this offers, nevertheless, the statement underscores the role of human agency in shaping ecological landscapes (second nature, in William Cronon's terms), both before and after the emergence of the great urban centers.  The emergence of a conservation ethic, one that contrasts with the more cavalier attitude of early settler population in the Chicago region, and one that informs the work of present day biodiversity conservationists and that inspires the work of Chicago Wilderness should be seem as a remarkably positive development.  Though we may not recoup the losses of species, communities and ecological processes that have largely been lost from the region, nonetheless it may be that we develop quite new social ecological systems  - in some cases, with highly cyborgian landscape emerging, mixtures of technology and forces beyond the immediate ken of humans – that are hopeful, biodiverse, and resilient in the face of ongoing anthropogenic disturbances.  We may be betting our lives on it. 

A Note on the Extinction of Fire in Chicago

When they occurred, fires on the Midwestern prairies were so great that the conflagrations both terrified and exulted witnesses. Albert, Prince of Wales, who would later become King Edward VII of England saw one when he visited Dwight, a small Illinois town located in Livingston County in the center of the state, in 1860. It provided an excellent supplement to the pleasures of the hunt. On his first full day of hunting Prince Albert bagged eleven and a half brace of prairie hens thus winning a bet for him against the Duke of Newcastle who killed three fewer. The prince had previously dispatched a screech owl. In his account of the visit Nicholas Woods reported that during the visit His Royal Highness not only had great sport with the prairie wildlife but he had been fortunate enough to see a prairie thunderstorm, a tremendous prairie fire and a prairie sunset.

The fire started during an evening thunderstorm before the hunters could return to the town. The fire started in three different places and though it seemed at first that the heavy downpour would quench the flames, nevertheless the fire moved on until the three fires joined together to create a great infernal wall. Close to the fire it was as bright as noon even though by then it was nightfall. The prairie wolves howled as they sped from the flame and the prairie chickens rose and fell back again upon the flames. Since the winds were heading away from Dwight the prince was in no danger and the company watched the flames indifferently.

Though the royal party was safe, not all have been so lucky in their encounters with prairie fire. David Turpie (1828-1909), a US senator for Indiana, describes how he became familiar with prairies in the 1850s.  Commenting on the natural history of the prairie “blue stem grass” he noted that as a consequence of how dry it became in fall, thousands of acres surrounding the farms of the region became combustible. To protect the farms, neighbors formed fire-brigades which rushed to the protect the most vulnerable properties.  They set carefully managed fires close to the places to be protected thus depriving the wild fire of its fuel.

The strategy of setting a fire line was standard advice for protection against a prairie fire even if one was heading towards you when you were traveling across the prairie. The smoke of such a fire darkens the sun and roars as it moves across the land. This is what you must do: ride your horse ten miles in advance of the fire lighting the prairie at a couple of points as you ride. As the fire takes off you can follow after on the scorched ground. The fire from which you are fleeing will hopefully not cross that ground.

At the height of the growing season when the grass may be taller than the horse upon which you ride, the fires are ever more dangerous and out-riding it will not be possible. The solution: you can slaughter your horse and climb into his disembowel carcass. If you are not cooked within the dead animal you can emerge some time later after the fire has passed.

Nicholas Woods described the sunset that so delighted the prince in 1860 in almost supernatural tones. It had a “glory which can never be described or understood by whose who have not seen it”. The prairie turned to gold, the sky pink and red, the clouds crimson and all was still. And then the color left the sky and the embers of that great fire could then be seen. So supernaturally unnerving did it seem to Woods that it was as if the sun had gone forever. For all of this, it was nevertheless the prairie that was about to be gone forever, and with it the vast conflagrations that had arrested a King-to-be.

Colonel Colbee Benton’s Sleepless Night on the Evening before Chicago’s Birth

On August 19^th 1833 Colonel Colbee Chamberlain Benton (1805-1880) left Chicago with Louis Ouilmette, a young man of French and Potawatomi heritage, to inform local Indian tribes that their federal annuities would be paid in September of that year.[1]  Benton’s trip, recorded in “A visitor to Chicago in the Indian Days: Journal of the Far-Off West”, was taken one year after the end of the Black Hawk war which ended most tribal resistance to white settlement of the Chicago area.[2]  That same year the Potawatomis, a tribe that dominated in the lands that became Chicago since the 1690s, relinquished their rights to their lands in Illinois.  At that time the white settler population was little more than 150 people.  A few years later in 1837 Chicago was chartered as a city.  

That Benton’s journey was undertaken at time of tension between the indigenous and settler population is reflected in his descriptions of their trip.  On the night of August 24^th the pair of travelers passed through some oak groves and arrived at a small stream in a little prairie in Southeast Wisconsin and they camped there for the night.  As night fell they heard Indians around their camp.  Benton hid beside a large tree and at Ouilmette’s suggestion he removed his straw hat since it was “a good mark to shoot at.”  Assessing the danger they found themselves in, Louis remarked that “there were occasionally some of the Sauks and Fox Indians wandering about in [that] part of the country, and from them [they] could not expect much mercy.” 

Benton didn’t sleep that night.  However, even if they had been “in danger of suffering from the power of their tomahawk and scalping knives” it was not fear that kept him awake.  He remarked, in fact, there was something about their circumstances “so novel and romantic about it that it dispelled every fear…” He was far from home, everything looked “wild and terrible”, he was surrounded by “savages” and yet it all seemed “lovely and romantic and beautiful”.  He felt happy.

So what kept Benton from his sleep?  It was the noise!  Some of the noise certainly may have emanated from the Indians who “mocked almost every wild animal.”  But also there were unfamiliar birds calling, as well as foxes and raccoons.  In the distance, wolves howled and owls hooted in concert with the wolves.  The mosquitoes added their part to “the music”.  A sleepless, noisy, vaguely threatening night, and yet Benton declared that never before had he “passed a night so interestingly, and so pleasantly…”

***

So here was Chicago on the eve of its 1837 charter.  A settler population numbered in the hundreds surrounded by a loud chorusing of people and wildlife.  Benton recorded the diversity of the vegetated landscape of northeast Illinois and southeast Wisconsin as they passed by on horseback.  Near Round Lake (Lake Country, Illinois) he noted that they ventured through little oak openings then out onto the prairie, alongside little streams with “heavy timber”, and, very muddily, across “tremendous marshes”.  The prairie grass were, as they often are in these early descriptions, so tall and wet that passing through on horseback was like “wading through water.”  They shot, usually unsuccessfully at any birds they could see: wild geese, ducks, loons, pigeons, a sand crane (successfully bagged), and a prairie hen (killed and roasted for the dog). Streams were home to “some monstrous pickerel and other large fishes.”  Dotted infrequently through this wilderness were the corn fields of Indians.  Thus it was a variegated landscape supporting a rich diversity of life, human and non-human.  A gloriously loud landscape it was then, one interesting and uncanny enough to keep a man awake and happy.

On the evening of Chicago’s birth Benton even found a moment for erotic thoughts.  The travelers stopped at a village where Louis was known to the chief.  Benton remarked him as “a tall good looking Indian about forty five years of age, and is a notable drunkard”.  There Benton spots a “very pretty squaw” who roasted some corn for them.  The next morning Benton reported himself to be a little grumpy not to have dreamt of her.  “Her tawny complexion”, he conceded, “only made her more interesting.”  When he glanced over at her he found that she was “looking serenely at the sky…”  Benton speculated that she “was some pure and sinless being whose noble spirit held converse with the angels in a brighter world, far above the mortal things of earth.”  It may be more likely, however, that she was solemnly preparing herself for departure from her home lands.  The village chief, called Warp-sa by Benton, was most likely Wapse who it is claimed sold the Potawatomi lands in Illinois and was responsible for the removal of the tribe to Kansas. 

And after the removal of the Indians, the landscape of the Chicago, under the influence of the vastly expanding population, turned to homogenous shit.  But that’s another story.    

---

[1] Of Prairie, Woods, and Water: Two Centuries of Chicago Nature Writing.  Edited by Joel Greenberg.  University of Chicago Press 2008

[2] Benton, Colbee C. , Edited by Getz, James R; Angle, Paul M.; Caxton Club; Caxton Club; Prairie Press (Iowa City, Iowa). 1957; Prairie Press (Iowa City, Iowa)

The Humanities and the Sciences Squabble for Sustainability’s Soul: First Thoughts

Chicago Wilderness is an environmental consortium with a mission to restore biodiversity and improve the quality of life for people living in the Greater Chicago area.  Their vision is to include one third of Chicago and the surrounding areas in an interconnected network of lands and waterways in order to provide a healthy and sustainable region for people and nature.  Although the sustainability goal of the consortium is focused on environmental outcomes, nonetheless there is recognition of the need to integrate this goal with the economic and social developmental plans for the region. Therefore the 260 member institutions of this sustainability oriented organization includes local, state and federal agencies, large conservation organizations, cultural and education institutions, volunteer groups, municipalities, corporations, and faith-based groups.  Together these organizations commit to four key initiatives: restore nature to health, protect green infrastructure, mitigate climate change, and leave no child inside.  Projects are undertaken through four teams:  education, natural resources, science and a sustainability team.  Representation in team leadership and in working groups are drawn from a range of professions: land managers, research social scientists, ecologists, conservation biologists, planners and so forth.  Many, though not all of course, are scientific in nature.  Few, in contrast, are drawn from humanities.  That is not to say that there are no individuals in the consortium with training in humanistic disciplines; indeed many may have.  Rather what I am contending here is that these individuals are not engaged in the work of Chicago Wilderness in their role as humanists, not, at least, in the way that the scientists are engaged in project work qua scientists.    

The sciences and humanities are often depicted as playing complementary roles in imagining a sustainable future.  However, there may be a competitive edge to their proposed usefulness for planning environmental sustainability.  Which provides the more powerful tools; in turn which should be provided with more resources when plans are being developed?

In some circles there is a perception that the sciences have failed in their task of securing the future.  For instance, In The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge, philosopher Bill Vitek and ecologist Wes Jackson interrogate the value of science in facing our current dilemmas.[1]  Their critique of science points to the supposedly unfortunate scientific legacy of the Enlightenment, shaping, as it did, the patterns of thought that facilitated an aggressive exploitation of the Earth’s resources, the large-scale despoliation of habitat, and the loss of diversity both organismic and cultural.  Such a critique can be extended by implicating the sciences in an ongoing complicity with the technological systems that perpetuate environmental problems thus endangering the health of planet and people.  Now Vitek and Jackson are not advocating the humanities as substituting for the sciences in sustainability studies.  Rather they ask: “Why not go with our long suit and have an ignorance based worldview.”  “We are”, they go on to say, “betting that there is an important paradox in all of this: knowledge and insight accumulate faster in the minds of those who hold an ignorance-based worldview…Darting eyes have the potential of seeing more.”  Though, as mentioned, the humanities are not proffered here as the intellectual corner stone of sustainability thinking, whatever else that might be, it certainly ain’t the sciences.  Nonetheless, one might ask whether the resources for designing a sustainable future are not in fact better excavated by the humanistic disciplines rather than dictated by the intellectual traditions of the sciences that created the problems. 

Lessons Learned from Chicago Wilderness—Implementing and Sustaining Conservation Management in an Urban Setting

...just out this week in Diversity... The pdf can be downloaded for free.

by Liam Heneghan, Christopher Mulvaney, Kristen Ross, Lauren Umek, Cristy Watkins, Lynne M. Westphal and David H. Wise

Abstract: We summarize the factors that shaped the biodiversity of Chicago and its hinterland and point out the conservation significance of these ecological systems, addressing why conservation of Chicago’s biodiversity has importance locally and beyond. We highlight Chicago Wilderness (CW), a regional biodiversity conservation alliance committed to protecting nature and enriching the lives of the region’s residents. Chicago Wilderness, with over 250 institutional members, has for over a decade coordinated the efforts of diverse institutions, including federal, state, and local agencies, public land-management agencies, conservation organizations, and scientific and cultural institutions. Chicago Wilderness is committed to using science and emerging knowledge as a foundation for its conservation work. CW has several specialist teams that promote an interdisciplinary approach to conservation; we focus on the work of the CW Science Team, the one team with a research mission. The scientific investigations that are undertaken to provide a knowledge base for the work of Chicago Wilderness have drawn upon a wide variety of conservation paradigms, including that of resilience thinking, which we illustrate in a series of case studies.

Keywords: urban biodiversity; resilience; ecological restoration; conservation alliance

Go to http://www.mdpi.com/1424-2818/4/1/74/ to download this badboy.

Interspersed Denuded Zones (IDZs): their ecology and conservation significance

This morning I got a chance to kick around ideas about Interspersed Denuded Zones (IDZs) with the Wise Lab in University of Illinois Chicago.  You may not have heard the term IDZs before.  The fact is I coined the term along with Vassia Pavlogianis very recently for a piece in 3quarksdaily. com entitled “A Tiny DyingSuch As This”. 

I wager the following: right now you doubt their existence, a year from now you’ll acknowledge them and perhaps recognize an IDZ when you see it, in five years you will argue with those that dismiss their ecological significance, and in ten years time you’ll vaguely recall having coined the term!  You may even be attending the first international meeting on IDZs by 2022.

An IDZ is one of a number of patches of exposed soil in a habitat which more typically has a well developed and contiguous leaf litter layer.  An IDZ can occur naturally where, for a variety of reasons, leaf litter decomposed more rapidly than it is replaced through leaf fall.  Alternatively IDZ can develop in response to a variety of anthropogenic disturbances.  If a non-native species with highly decomposable leaf litter replaces species with more recalcitrant litter then an IDZ can develop.  Similarly modification of the decomposer community (e.g. introduction of non-native earthworms) can accelerate the breakdown of litter.  Other factors may contribute – nitrogen deposition, elevated temperature etc can result in the altered dynamics of soil organic matter.

The ecological significance of IDZs have not to my knowledge been investigated (that is, under any name) though Kristen Ross from UIC, a post-doc with Chicago Wilderness, tells me that there is now some interest in looking at biodiversity of invaded patches in Eastern deciduous forest where invasive species have radically altered the litter layer.  However, in cases where the litter completely disappears the consequences will be quite different.

In A Tiny Dying I was primarily interested in the conservation implications – my suspicion is that with the intermittent loss of litter the effective habitat size for litter dwellers disappears and the populations crash.  As a result there may be a lot of local extinction as a result.  If I am correct this may be one of the most significant conservation crises of our times.  This is because there a huge proportion of the diversity of organisms of most terrestrial systems living in the litter layer. 

I appreciated getting great input on this idea from all my colleagues at David Wise’s lab at UIC this morning. Basil Iannone, Cristian Martínez, Dan Milz (especially for the hover-board suggestion!), Kristen Ross, Matthew McCary, Monica Farfan, Robin Mores, and Susan Kirt Alterio.

Restoration as a key strategy for Green Infrastructure Planning in Chicago

Liam Heneghan and Gerry Clabby (Fingal County Council, Dublin, Ireland)

The role of green infrastructure in facilitating energy flows and material exchanges that sustain human habitation in urban regions is becoming more apparent and its importance for long term urban planning is being increasingly recognized. Open space planning (i.e., parks, wildlife corridors, urban forests) has long been on the agenda of urban designers. In contrast, green infrastructure serves as a way of framing discussions about the future of the city so that green spaces in are presented alongside engineered structures (i.e., roads, bridges, sewers) in urban areas so both can be simultaneously regarded as providing vital environmental services.

Green infrastructure gives metropolitan planners and engineers a greater range of tools for mitigating urban problems. Additionally, if more extensive green space is planned and protected in metropolitan areas then this increases the opportunities for biodiversity conservation. Thus, green infrastructure combines several seemingly disparate environmental strategies such as increasing ecosystems services, enhancing biodiversity conservation, and bringing a landscape ecological perspective to the management of urban regions where open space is no longer considered as isolated fragments.

We provide a definition for green infrastructure as this is a relatively new term and is used inconsistently. However, we demonstrate the usefulness of the term “green infrastructure” as a way of integrating several aspects of an urban ecological strategy. In particular, we argue that restoration is a critical tactic in achieving functional green infrastructure in large metropolitan areas where degraded ecosystems are often assailed by multiple stressors. We illustrate progress made in the Chicago area in developing a green infrastructure vision, and suggest a number of key knowledge gaps, attention to which may increase our ability to translate this vision into a reality.

Green Infrastructure Defined

We define green infrastructure as the ecological features of a human settlement that may be considered alongside traditional engineered infrastructure to enhance ecological values and functions. Usually green infrastructure is deployed for the benefit of the resident human populations although in the cases of natural areas conservation the supposed benefit for people may be an indirect one. This broad definition captures the range of uses to which the term has been applied, from those structures and processes that augment urban storm flow systems (Anon. 2008) to interconnected natural areas that contribute to human welfare (Benedict and McMahon 2006). Green infrastructure builds on previous work on ecosystems services, urban natural capital evaluation, and open space protection by integrating these insights explicitly into landuse planning in partnership with others involved in urban planning.

Since much open space in urban areas is currently either low diversity turf grass or degraded semi-natural land, restoration may be a key ingredient in increasing the ecological functioning of this land where the potential of this land to serve as green infrastructure is recognized and thus has been incorporated into urban planning. In order to provide a city with services required to augment, and in some cases replace, elements of gray infrastructure, the rehabilitation or restoration of open space will often be required. Green Infrastructure Planning in Chicago

Reversing the Flow - a New Way of thinking about Restoration Management

Since this term "reversing the flow" is catching on in our research group I thought it might be useful for me to post the first time I used this term.  It was in a 2008 white paper written as part of the process leading to our successful Coupled-Natural-Human-Systems proposal (we now call this project RESTORE - Rethinking Ecological and Social Theories of Restoration Ecology).

The Central Metaphor

In 1900 the flow of the Chicago River was reversed in one of the most dramatic engineering projects in the region’s history.  The project was a solution to a problem that otherwise compromised the human and ecological health of Chicago (Lake Michigan was unsustainably both a source of water and ultimately a sink for waste).  A little more than a century later, we should attempt to solve another significant challenge: how can we enhance the management of protected terrestrial ecological systems - areas that are typically swamped by influences from the vaster unmanaged metropolitan lands that surround them - in a way that simultaneously enriches both the human and ecological health of the region?  We need to investigate if ecological systems designed and managed with resilience in mind (arguably the current best management practices for restoration do not produce resilience results, and quickly revert to a ‘degraded’ condition) can exert a stronger influence on the landscape on a larger scale (which includes these large unmanaged areas) than is currently the case.  In this way we can arguably “reverse the flow” of restoration influence or more precisely modify the fluxes, of influence between managed and unmanaged preserved systems. 

Sneak Peek at 100 Sites Map

 

This cool map is from the 100 sites project (100 1 hectare research sites in the Chicago Wilderness region where researchers and ecological managers are collaborating on long term evaluation of restoration activities).  David Wise from University of Illinois Chicago, and I are PIs on this Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation funded project.  Lauren Umek is project manager and has overseen the work on all of the sites. The map was prepared by Alex Ulp.

Finished: "Lessons learned from Chicago Wilderness – Implementing and sustaining Resiliency-Oriented Management (ROM)"

This has been a collaboration with several of my Chicago Wilderness colleagues.  Assuming all goes well it'll go into a book where the authors from around the world look at cities from the perspective of resilience theory. I was happy to include a brief description of our "100 Sites for 100 years project", overseen by the incomparable Lauren Umek of DePaul and Northwestern, and with me and Dr David Wise from UIC as the co-PIs.

Funded by the The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, the ‘100 Sites’ project identifies a unique collaborative effort between CW coalition to move toward realizing its vision of increasing the number of accessible, interconnected, restored, diverse and healthy ecosystems in the greater Chicago metropolitan area. This project capitalizes on the general best management practices of the region’s land managers by including multiple natural areas subject to similar management and time frames in a replicated experiment in order to address two main questions that relate to current outcomes of restoration efforts:  How effective are current management practices for restoring and conserving biodiversity?  How effective are current management practices for rehabilitating key ecosystem processes?  In addition, this program has prepared the groundwork for addressing questions into the future.  It has established sites that will be maintained at current management regimes for many years (maybe not a hundred, but that's our idealistic goal), with the goal of uncovering long-term trends in management outcomes that will appear with climate change and changing influences of urbanization.

Lesson learned from Chicago Wilderness – Implementing and sustaining Resiliency-Oriented Management (ROM)

by Liam Heneghan

1. Introduction

Chicago is the largest city in the US Midwest, and the third largest in the country, with a metropolitan population of 2.7 million people . The greater Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) to which Chicago belongs has a population of 9,461,105. The density within the city is 20 519/km2, which is more than fifty times denser than the state of Illinois as a whole. The radical and rapid transformation of the landscape that has occurred over the past century and a half in order to accommodate this burgeoning population might suggest that Chicago is not an especially promising place to undertake a large scale conservation effort. However, the region supports conservation effects that are recognized as significant at the local, national and international scale. That significant biodiversity protection occurs in Chicago is a consequence of the region’s climate and its evolutionary and ecological history, as well as being deriving from decisions instituted by the human population, both before and after settlement of the region by European and other non-indigenous populations (hereafter referred to as “settlement”), that resulted in either setting land aside from development or maintained the characteristic biodiversity of the area.

In this chapter we summarize the factors that shaped the biodiversity of Chicago and its hinterland and point out the conservation significance of these ecological systems, addressing why conservation effects directed at Chicago’s biodiversity has importance locally and beyond. Our main focus in the chapter is the work of Chicago Wilderness, a regional biodiversity alliance commitment to protecting nature and enriching the lives of the residents of the area. Chicago Wilderness has for over a decade served to coordinate the efforts of a diverse group of institutions included federal, state, and local agencies; public land management agencies, conservation organizations; and scientific and cultural institutions. We describe the history and structure of the alliance and describe the four key initiatives of Chicago Wilderness, namely, 1. Restore the health of local nature, 2. Green infrastructure, 3. Combating climate change, and 4. The Leave No Child Inside program. Although Chicago Wilderness has received much positive attention over the past decade and its work has been recognized by planners, academics, and editorialists, and by the agencies that make up the alliance, the efforts have not been without controversy. We give examples of the controversies and indicate how the alliance has learned from them.