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Illinois UrbanWatch A joint program of The Field Museum, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, and the Illinois Natural History Survey, Illinois UrbanWatch is a citizen-scientist monitoring program that tracks the condition and extent of urban green spaces statewide. Illinois high school teachers, students, and adult volunteers conduct surveys of native species in local urban green spaces, such as schoolyards, corporate parks, and cemeteries. They then enter their data into an online database. These online reports are analyzed by scientists to identify long-term trends in the biological quality of the region’s urban areas and by land managers to adjust management plans to reach conservation goals. The data collected also provide a baseline for UrbanWatch participants to engage in conservation action projects focused on assessing environmental and ecological conditions. To learn more about the program, visit the UrbanWatch website, or email Kirk Anne Taylor at kataylor@fieldmuseum.org. <<back Neotropical Birds: Ecology and Conservation Published by The University of Chicago Press, this book and companion CD contain a comprehensive compilation of the ecology and distribution of the more than 4,000 species of birds that live from Mexico south to Tierra del Fuego. The data include the Museum's specimens and those of other large collections and information from the field expertise of top ornithologists. The book contains an analysis of the data to detect the regions with the highest concentration of restricted vulnerable bird species. It also provides guidelines to illustrate how governments, conservation organizations, and wildlife managers can use ecological databases to anchor conservation strategies and land management decisions in sound biological reality. Copies of the book are available at www.press.uchicago.edu. <<back Remote-Sensing Imagery Project for Chicago Wilderness Tracking Natural Community Fragmentation and Changes in Land Use and Land Cover: A Case Study of Chicago Wilderness was a NASA-funded project and represents a partnership among ECP, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Science and Land Management Teams of Chicago Wilderness. This project used multispectral data from the Landsat Thematic Mapper and associated ground truthing to produce a current vegetation map for Chicago Wilderness. Analyses with models based on geographic information systems developed to detect changes in land cover revealed rapid acceleration of urban and suburban sprawl in the previous twelve years. Satellite images provided striking visual comparisons of land use and health as well as banks of geographically referenced data for quantitative tracking of trends. The data on habitat degradation and fragmentation have contributed a biological foundation for restoration goals in the region. To order copies of the publication, contact Chicago Wilderness at (312)580-2137. <<back |
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