Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, located just north of Wilmington IL in Will County, is seeking a full-time Assistant Volunteer Coordinator. This position is possible because of a partnership between the U.S. Forest Service and The Nature Conservancy.
To view this job posting and apply, please visit www.nature.org/careers. You can search by using the job ID #41231. All applicants must apply online; Midewin does not accept emailed resumes. Submit your resume and cover letter as one document. All applications must be submitted in the system prior to 11:59 pm Eastern Time on July 16, 2013.
Allison Cisneros – Volunteer Coordinator
The Nature Conservancy @ U.S. Forest Service
Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie
30239 South IL State Route 53, Wilmington IL 60481
Work: 815.423.2149 Cell: 815.474.3808 acisneros@tnc.org
After my sandwich break today while telecommuting from the Joliet Public Library’s Black Road Branch location, I took a postprandial stroll through the marsh at the Rock Run Forest Preserve, which is just to the west of the library.
Song Sparrow (Cornell Lab of Ornithology)
Heard one of my favorite sounds of spring: the three-part call of the song sparrow, one of the most eloquent of North America’s songbirds. He might have an understated appearance, this little brown songster — but what a voice! Here’s some info on this aptly-named species, Melospiza melodia, from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where you can hear the song yourself and learn more about its biology.
Better yet, get outside where some woods meets a lake, a river, or a clearing, and you’ll probably spot a song sparrow perched on a shrub or a small tree. Or, like me, hear it first.
Last week I had the privilege of attending a two-day meeting at the Field Museum’s Biodiversity Synthesis Center (BioSynC) hosted by museum botanist and early land plants collections manager Matt von Konrat. I joined faculty and students from several Chicago colleges and universities to discuss how to develop college curriculum for the taxonomic study of the liverwort genus, Frullania, one of many under-studied yet incredibly important bryophytes that are the oldest type of land plants and key bio-indicators of environmental degradation and climate change.
Faculty and students convene at the Aug 29 and 30 biodiversity research and curriculum workshop held in the FMNH’s BioSynC center (photo: K. Lugo)
With the rise of molecular genetics and related disciplines since the 1950s, biology as a whole has seen a massive shift away from the traditional natural history-based disciplines of comparative anatomy and taxonomy, pursuits rooted in the 18th- and 19th-century study of nature. Yet the imperative to catalog and assess the world’s remaining biodiversity in our current age of mass extinction, a process largely driven by human action, means that current taxonomists working in museum collections and the field have a critical task ahead of them. The NSF-funded Connecting Biodiversity Research with Curriculum project spearheaded by the Field Museum’s Konrat and his colleagues is a creative way to involve students and non-scientists in the essential data collection and analysis work vital to cataloguing bryophyte species, re-assessing their place on the tree of life, and providing a model for similar work for other organisms.
This past week saw some great news this week for citizens of the greater Chicago region as well as southeast Wisconsin. The US Dept of the Interior has announced the approval of the Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge, a constellation of planned open spaces and conservation areas that will link existing green spaces in NE Illinois and SE Wisconsin. It will be the closest wildlife refuge to the Chicago area, and is a future boon for regional ecotourism, land preservation planning, and sustainable economic development.
The map above depicts the original study area of the proposed refuge. According to the USFWS Division of Conservation Planning, it “includes the refuge Study Area boundary in black plus conservation lands currently owned by the State of Illinois, the State of Wisconsin, counties in both states, non-governmental organizations, land conservancies, and private individuals. Because land ownership is dynamic, some existing conservation lands may not be shown and some areas may have changed in status since this data were obtained.”
This somewhat more schematic map below, which was distributed widely via the media, shows the now-authorized boundaries of the new refuge, and clearly depicts the donut-shaped collection of open space and protected lands (including future conservation areas) that straddles the Illinois-Wisconsin state border.
What makes the Hackmatack Refuge unique within the longstanding national wildlife refuge system is its close proximity to a major metropolitan area (and therefore millions of potential visitors per year) and the fact that it will be composed of a mosaic of present and future protected landscapes, rather than a single contiguous parcel of federal land. For more information on the scope and significance of Hackmatack, see this news article from the Daily Herald, the Friends of Hackmatack website, and US Fish & Wildlife Service’s official webpage for the Hackmatack National Wildlife Refuge.
This summer my family and I took our annual vacation to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where we camp out at the Bryson family cabin — a fairly humble one-room cottage in Hiawatha National Forest on the shores of little Crooked Lake (a lovely place to canoe and observe wildlife, among other woodsy pursuits). There’s no bathroom or hot water: just a hand pump in the cabin and an outhouse twenty yards out into the woods. The nearest little town of any note is about 12 miles up the road. Still, with a roof over our heads and electricity in the cabin, staying there feels rather more deluxe than, say, camping out in a tent.
After a week or so in the UP, we drove back roads through Wisconsin to Baraboo, where we spent a few days exploring the countryside and doing fun stuff with the kids. The Baraboo area is home to many delightful natural areas and sites of interest, including the much visited Devil’s Lake State Park; the beautiful though overly commercialized Wisconsin Dells; and the International Crane Foundation, a remarkable wildlife conservation facility. After our visit to the Crane Foundation north of Baraboo, we drove one of Wisconsin’s beautiful “rustic roads” that parallels a levee along the south bank of the Wisconsin River, and pulled off the road once we came to an unmarked turnoff in the middle of the woods.
Here I took a few minutes to hike a sandy road into a clearing not quite visible from the road. This is the site of “The Shack” — Aldo Leopold’s weekend retreat on the farm he purchased in the early 1930s as a family getaway and place where he could put into practice the conservation principles and restoration techniques he and others were developing in the early to mid-20th century.
Once a chicken coop that Leopold converted into a family cabin, the shack is a tiny structure by today’s standards. I realized as a walked around it, dwelling in its quiet presence, that it was significantly smaller than the 20×24-foot cabin we use in the UP — by comparison, our summer home is a roomy palace. Yet this humble shack looms large in American conservation and literary history, given its inspiration for Leopold’s classic 1949 work of environmental literature, A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There. Though I spent a mere twenty minutes or so at the site — listening to the wind filtering through the tree canopy, and wondering about the current of the Wisconsin River, flowing just to the north of the Leopold farmstead — it was impossible not to feel the power of this particular place. I left reluctantly.
As we drove east on Levee Road, we pulled off again to scale the grassy levee, which was topped by a profusion of wildflowers — and enjoyed a commanding view of the Wisconsin River, here a wide and fast-flowing stream with many sandbars and heavily-wooded shorelines. Further on up the road, my wife spotted a family of wild turkeys, which scuttled up over the levee at the noise of our passing. We stopped to take a look at them, and watched mesmerized as the male set ran off first in one direction, toward the river, while the female led her young away at a different angle, toward a copse of trees. An exciting and special moment, one I was glad to have on the heels of finally seeing Leopold’s cabin after many years of simply reading about it.
The key litmus test of a good professional conference for me is this: are there cool field trips planned? If the answer is yes, the gathering is likely to be an enjoyable and fruitful occasion. That was definitely the case at the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences conference this past weekend in California, where I went on a bus and walking tour of two urban farms in the Silicon Valley: Full Circle Farm in Sunnydale (near Santa Clara), and Veggielution Community Farm in San José. Both are quite large operations by urban farm standards, but like many such sites are relatively young in age and still under development.
Full Circle Farm is intriguing for a number of reasons. At ten acres, the farmstead is huge — walking the grounds you have an expansive view of the sky and feel the freedom of being in a large swath of open land — something rather different from most small gardens and farms that are hemmed in with the urban built environment.
The farm is located on grounds owned by the local school district: formerly a football field, the land now belongs to an adjacent middle school, which leases the property to the Full Circle Farm non-profit organization in exchange for free educational programming for the school district. (The precise and somewhat complex terms of the lease are now up for renegotiation, something fairly typical for urban farm operations.) The farm is incredibly diverse: it has plot after plot of veggies and herbs, of course, but also free-roaming chickens, a children’s garden, a huge community garden area run by volunteers, a large outdoor theater (!), and more.
Full Circle Farm, Sunnyvale CA (from their website)
One fascinating thing that happened while we were there was an up-close wildlife encounter: a juvenile red-tailed hawk flew around and perched near us for several minutes. It was trying to hunt some recently fledged killdeer in a plowed field, something the parent killdeer weren’t too pleased about; while unsuccessful in her hunt, perhaps due to the fussing of the parent killdeer, the hawk taught us an important urban ecology lesson: a farm of this scale, and probably one considerably smaller, can provide critical habitat for wildlife in the city and suburban landscape, and thus contribute to the conservation of biodiversity (in addition to all the other incredible functions of these spaces).
The other farmstead we visited was in San José, in the midst of a largely Hispanic community of limited means and with great need of access to fresh, healthy food. Hence the mission of Veggielution Community Farm, which aims to “build community[,] . . . embrace diversity[,] . . . empower youth[, and] . . . create a sustainable food system.” At two acres under cultivation, this farm started back in 2008 as a humble community garden plot within an existing city parkland — the Emma Prusch Farm Park — that itself was donated to San José by a forward-thinking woman who decided that agricultural land preservation in the fast-urbanizing Silicon Valley was more important than selling her property to developers. Current plans call for significantly expanding the farm’s operation within several more acres they have leased from the park district.
Veggielution Community Farm, San Jose CA (from their website)
An intriguing features of Veggielution Community Farm is its location: right along the soaring and rather imposing structure of a long, curving highway entrance ramp — a landscape feature that is highlighted in their official logo. But looking in the other direction with the roar of the highway at your back, you can see mountains in the not-too-far distance along the suburban horizon (as shown at left). To a native Midwesterner, this was a visually dramatic location to observe the typical on-the-ground activities of an urban farm.
My big takeaway from visiting these urban farms in Silicon Valley, a place simultaneously of great wealth and of considerable need among the less-fortunate population? Large-scale farms such as these are impressive for a number of reasons, and incredible diverse and multifaceted in their outreach to and impact upon the community. They also, like most urban farms, plunge forward despite heavy reliance upon volunteer labor (and even volunteer management, to some degree), regular turnover among staff (such as the 1-2 year rotations by AmeriCorps workers, who are an amazing and vital human resource here), and razor-thin budget margins. They have the benefit of a year-round growing season, yes, but must import all of their water because the region is so dry. And they combine the production of good food with exuberant cultural activities and positive and progressive community development. They are thus places of magic and inspiration — and hope for a more sustainable food production system in suburban ecosystems.
Here in the Midwest, the heart of the heartland, we’re making strides with urban farming — especially in big cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit. But the smaller cities and suburbs have a lot of catching up to do. That’s OK, but we should get going soon. For while our growing season here in Illinois is shorter than that of CA, we’ve got good land to work and/or reclaim — and abundant precipitation to feed our crops (this dry spring and early summer excepted). And as for people in need of work, inspiration, education, and healthy food? Yeah, we’ve got them in abundance.
This summer the Field Museum of Natural History here in the Chicago is offering several Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) fellowships for summer research in the biological sciences. This is a unique and valuable opportunity to do paid (!) summer research in one of the most important natural history research institutions in the world. Please see this website for more information, and note the upcoming deadline of March 15th for applications.
As an undergraduate biology major at Illinois Wesleyan University in the 1980s, I applied for and received two REU summer fellowships. Not only did I earn a generous 3-month stipend and learn a tremendous amount about how science is done in the lab and out in the field, but as I look back on those experiences I now realize how much they helped shape my future career direction and attitudes about science and nature.
For more information beyond the above, please contact Sustainability Studies Prof. Julian Kerbis Peterhans (jkerbis@fieldmuseum.org and 312-665-7758), who has taught SUST 330 Biodiversity and BIOL Museum Internship classes at the FMNH. Minority and non-traditional students are particularly encouraged to apply.
For the last several months, the Great Lakes Commission and the US Army Corps of Engineers have been conducting parallel studies on the feasibility of re-separating the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds here in the Chicago Region. This challenging process is motivated by the threat of Asian Carp moving northward from the Illinois Waterway system through the Chicago and/or Calumet Rivers and into the Great Lakes.
Keeping the invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes will involve re-reversing the flow of the Chicago River — an engineering marvel completed a century ago through a complex network of rivers, canals, and locks, a new study said on Tuesday.
The study proposed three options to separate the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River basin near Chicago and keep Asian carp and other invaders out but all three would require re-reversing the flow of Chicago river which now carries Chicago’s treated waste water away from its Lake Michigan drinking water.
“Physically separating the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds is the best long-term solution for preventing the movement of Asian carp and other aquatic invasive species, and our report demonstrates that it can be done,” said Tim Eder, executive director of the Great Lakes Commission, sponsor of the study with several other interest groups.
The prolific Asian carp have populated the Mississippi River and many of its tributaries and now threaten the $7 billion fishery in the lakes, which contain one-fifth of the world’s fresh surface water and supply 35 million people with drinking water.
The invasions by Silver and Bighead carp, first introduced to control algae in commercial fish ponds, have prompted promotional efforts to catch them as a source of cheap protein or for sport fishing, but their populations have exploded.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is conducting its own long-term study on possible separation of the watersheds that is due to be completed in 2015, has erected electric underwater barriers at a canal bottleneck near Chicago to try to keep the carp at bay, but some marine experts fear the carp may have already bypassed the barriers.
Several states bordering the lakes have demanded stronger action and have filed a suit against the Army Corps calling for quick action to erect separation barriers and speed up its study.
Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, who is pursuing the states’ lawsuit, praised the Commission’s study, saying “with thousands of jobs and a spectacular ecological resource at stake, we can no longer afford to wait for the federal government.”
Commercial shippers and the recreational and tour boat industries have opposed closing locks and dams between the two watersheds, saying it would destroy their businesses. Previous federal court rulings have also noted closing locks permanently would worsen flooding during storms.
Four Indiana congressmen issued statements objecting to the economic cost to the northwest corner of the state if plans are undertaken to permanently divide the two watersheds. . . .
Environmental groups backed the separation plans, with Marc Smith of the National Wildlife Federation saying the study “puts solutions on the table that are both feasible and affordable.”
The Commission’s 18-month-long study estimated the total cost of erecting barriers to achieve ecological separation and measures to address water quality, flood prevention and alternative transportation at up to $9.5 billion.
The least costly option, the “Mid System” approach, would cost between $3.3 billion and $4.3 billion and involve erecting four barriers including one near the existing O’Brien Lock nearly Lake Calumet. At that point, a facility could be built to transfer cargo between river barges and trains, trucks, or lake-going boats. A second barrier on the Chicago River could be equipped with a system to lift and transfer recreational boats from one side to the other.
Another option would place five barriers in waterways closer to Lake Michigan, and a third would place one barrier further downstream. Both pose significant transportation and flood management challenges, raising the costs to more than $9.5 billion, the study said.
The study projected a two-phase implementation of the plans with an initial target to erect barriers by 2022. Flood protection depends in part on completion by 2029 of a $3.7 billion system of tunnels and reservoirs designed to divert Chicago area’s stormwater, a project begun in the early 1970s.
Besides Asian carp and its ability to scour the lakes’ food supply and out-compete other fish species, the Army Corps has identified 39 other invasive species — 10 poised to enter the lakes and 29 ready to invade the rivers — that could traverse the two watersheds and threaten the ecological balance. Those include fish such as the northern snakehead, plants such as the water chestnut and mat-forming hydrilla, and crustaceans such as the spiny water flea.
A total of 180 non-native aquatic species are established in the Great Lakes, and 163 are established in the Mississippi River basin.
What will be interesting to see is how the Great Lakes Commission’s report impacts the current dialogue about the best way to proceed in keeping the Asian Carp at bay while simultaneously assuring the economic and environmental sustainability of the Great Lakes-to-the-Gulf of Mexico shipping connection. In the meantime, I recommend the Report’s extensive website, which also features abundant video and image resources.
One of the giants of 20th century microbiology and evolutionary theory, Dr. Lynn Margulis of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, died at age 73 this past Tuesday, Nov. 22nd. Margulis was a brilliant scientist and gifted writer who not only developed the important new evolutionary theory of endosymbiosis in the 1960s but also proved adept at connecting the insights of microbiology to evolution, genetics, ecology, and geology. Her work on the evolution of cells in the early earth environment was both elegant and complex, and helped revolutionize prevailing views on the mechanisms of evolutionary change. Notably, Margulis was able to communicate these ideas gracefully and forcefully to a general audience through her many books, some written in collaboration with her son, the science writer Dorion Sagan.
I heard Dr. Margulis speak two times — most recently, at the 2006 conference of Science, Literature, and the Arts in New York City, where she gave a distinguished keynote address; and before that, at Virginia Tech in the mid-1990s as a featured presenter at a biology symposium.
Graphic outline of the endosymbiotic theory of cell evolution (Univ of Utah, "Learn. Genetics."
Back then, after her stunning talk in a larger lecture hall in front of several hundred people, I mustered the courage to come up to her afterward and express my admiration for her work — especially her uncanny ability to make the science of bacterial evolution exciting, engaging, and utterly relevant to the grand history of life on earth (though I didn’t put it so grandly at the time). I remember how incredibly gracious she was in speaking with me for several minutes, despite her fame and reputation.
The world of science, and our larger culture as well, will miss such a person. Dr. Margulis’ obituary in the New York Times (from Thursday, Nov. 24th, by Bruce Weber) is reprinted below.
Lynn Margulis, a biologist whose work on the origin of cells helped transform the study of evolution, died on Tuesday at her home in Amherst, Mass. She was 73.
She died five days after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke, said Dorion Sagan, a son she had with her first husband, the cosmologist Carl Sagan.
Dr. Margulis had the title of distinguished university professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, since 1988. She drew upon earlier, ridiculed ideas when she first promulgated her theory, in the late 1960s, that cells with nuclei, which are known as eukaryotes and include all the cells in the human body, evolved as a result of symbiotic relationships among bacteria.
The hypothesis was a direct challenge to the prevailing neo-Darwinist belief that the primary evolutionary mechanism was random mutation.
Rather, Dr. Margulis argued that a more important mechanism was symbiosis; that is, evolution is a function of organisms that are mutually beneficial growing together to become one and reproducing. The theory undermined significant precepts of the study of evolution, underscoring the idea that evolution began at the level of micro-organisms long before it would be visible at the level of species.
“She talked a lot about the importance of micro-organisms,” said her daughter, Jennifer Margulis. “She called herself a spokesperson for the microcosm.”
The manuscript in which Dr. Margulis first presented her findings was rejected by 15 journals before being published in 1967 by the Journal of Theoretical Biology. An expanded version, with additional evidence to support the theory — which was known as the serial endosymbiotic theory — became her first book, “Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.”
A revised version, “Symbiosis in Cell Evolution,” followed in 1981, and though it challenged the presumptions of many prominent scientists, it has since become accepted evolutionary doctrine.
“Evolutionists have been preoccupied with the history of animal life in the last 500 million years,” Dr. Margulis wrote in 1995. “But we now know that life itself evolved much earlier than that. The fossil record begins nearly 4,000 million years ago! Until the 1960s, scientists ignored fossil evidence for the evolution of life, because it was uninterpretable.
“I work in evolutionary biology, but with cells and micro-organisms. Richard Dawkins, John Maynard Smith, George Williams, Richard Lewontin, Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould all come out of the zoological tradition, which suggests to me that, in the words of our colleague Simon Robson, they deal with a data set some three billion years out of date.”
Lynn Petra Alexander was born on March 5, 1938, in Chicago, where she grew up in a tough neighborhood on the South Side. Her father was a lawyer and a businessman. Precocious, she graduated at 18 from the University of Chicago, where she met Dr. Sagan as they passed each other on a stairway.
She earned a master’s degree in genetics and zoology from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at Massachusetts, she taught for 22 years at Boston University.
Dr. Margulis was also known, somewhat controversially, as a collaborator with and supporter of James E. Lovelock, whose Gaia theory states that Earth itself — its atmosphere, the geology and the organisms that inhabit it — is a self-regulating system, maintaining the conditions that allow its perpetuation. In other words, it is something of a living organism in and of itself.
Dr. Margulis’s marriage to Dr. Sagan ended in divorce, as did a marriage to Thomas N. Margulis, a chemist. Dr. Sagan died in 1996.
In addition to her daughter and her son Dorion, a science writer with whom she sometimes collaborated, she is survived by two other sons, Jeremy Sagan and Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma; three sisters, Joan Glashow, Sharon Kleitman and Diane Alexander; three half-brothers, Robert, Michael and Mark Alexander; a half-sister, Sara Alexander; and nine grandchildren.
“More than 99.99 percent of the species that have ever existed have become extinct,” Dr. Margulis and Dorion Sagan wrote in “Microcosmos,” a 1986 book that traced, in readable language, the history of evolution over four billion years, “but the planetary patina, with its army of cells, has continued for more than three billion years. And the basis of the patina, past, present and future, is the microcosm — trillions of communicating, evolving microbes.”
To view this job posting and apply, please visit www.nature.org/careers. You can search by using the job ID #41231. All applicants must apply online; Midewin does not accept emailed resumes. Submit your resume and cover letter as one document. All applications must be submitted in the system prior to 11:59 pm Eastern Time on July 16, 2013.
