The Urban Biodiversity Master Plan has neared its completion and will be sent to the iCAP Resilience Team for implementation. The iCAP Resilience Team will continue to work with city officals from Savoy, Champaign, and Urbana to collaborate and establish this comprehensive plan.

Hi Miram, Morgan, and Scott,

We have a draft for the biodiversity plan! I would like to get your initial reactions before we send it out for broader review. Would you have time to take a look in December? If you feel like someone else for the Resilience Committee is more appropriate, we are open to that. I just want an initial signal check to make sure there aren’t any obvious gaps or omissions.

It will go though a copy edit so don’t worry too much about typos.

Many thanks.

Lisa

The iCAP Resilience Team met on October 20th to discuss charge letter priorities and current recommendations. Meeting minutes are attached.

Biodiversity Plan intern Gabriel Harper-Hagen is looking for students and student groups to help him develop two iNaturalist surveys for the project. Here is the detailed explanation from Gabe:

The survey will act as a pilot for future surveying around campus and the broader community. We will have two surveys: one focused on animals and one focused on plants. This is because of the different methods of surveying each. The surveys will benefit from as many students that would be interested in this for either one (Or both). The survey will attempt to efficiently gather data about the diversity of plant and animal species found on campus to create a baseline for what is present and to help identify gaps on the campus where diversity may be lacking. If successful, I hope to expand the model to other parts of the community including the park districts to have larger community based BioBlitz seasonally to keep track of the diversity in the area and measure success of the biodiversity plan. 

As far as students can help, we need enough people to survey the area efficiently in a reasonable amount of time. The student groups and individual students would be helping in an initial survey that focuses only on the campus. My thought is that a date will be set for each of the two surveys where the participants can join to go over brief instructions on identifying plants with iNaturalist, adding them to the project, and explaining the purpose of surveying. iNaturalist allows for specific project data to be collected within a region which is then peer reviewed. Ideally, there will be some experts (students or professors if appropriate) that join for each survey to help with logistics and identification. I hope this will not only be a useful database for our campus to utilize, but also a fun learning experience. 

All iCAP students and environmental student groups are encouraged to participate. If interested, please email Gabe (harperh2@illinois.edu) and Resilience iCAP Team clerk Asli Topuzlu (aslit2@illinois.edu). 

On Wednesday, March 30th, the Resilience iCAP Team had their second meeting of the semester. The team discussed updates on projects such as the Environmental Justice Plan, the Biodiversity Plan and events for Earth Month. Meeting minutes are attached. 

Files associated with the Biodiversity Plan.