Chicago Wilderness Slinks Home with a Bad Report Card

Despite some shining exceptions, this region’s outstanding nature is in trouble with the principal. If our natural areas were students, they’d be grounded.

Leon Halloran is working away at a patch of buckthorn and green ash that have invaded a savanna at Bluff Spring Fen in Elgin. In the more than 25 years of work to restore this 90-acre site — one of the two best fen complexes in Illinois — he has seen a brushy mess with small pockets of richness gradually transform into a gorgeous restored treasure. The Friends of the Fen volunteers and their staff supporters know that they’ve done a lot of good: Not only can they see it in the acres of native wildflowers that bloom each spring and summer, they’ve also measured the ecological health of the place, performing scientific surveys of plants and animals there.

Bluff Spring Fen is one of hundreds of sites across the Chicago Wilderness region that have been lucky enough to receive the caring attention of conservation agencies with their cadres of volunteers dedicated to specific places on the landscape. At these sites, people have a good idea of how things are going, ecologically speaking.

But the major conservation challenge facing the Chicago region these days is the thousands of other “preserved” sites that aren’t receiving this kind of attention. Though protected from development in conservation purchases, often decades ago, the majority — 60 or 70 percent for some agencies — aren’t being managed. They have been subjected to many decades’ worth of changes like nothing they have experienced before: roads, development, invasive species. Their historical custodians — American Indians, large predators, and fire — have been taken away. In short, they’ve been orphaned in a world that is becoming more and more hostile to them.

That’s why they are failing in the recent “report card” (though who ever got a 167-page report card?), entitled The State of Our Chicago Wilderness, released this April by the Chicago Wilderness consortium on the tenth anniversary of its establishment.

The two-year study is the only one in the nation, perhaps the world, to rate ecological wholeness on a regional scale and establish a baseline condition from which to measure progress. A collaborative effort supported by the 193 organizations that make up the coalition, the report card engaged more than 100 scientists and naturalists to take a critical and quantitative look at the 250,000 acres of preserves and wild places in their care.

How Nature Scored

So what is the ecological state of natural areas in Chicago Wilderness? To put it bluntly, if our natural areas were students, they would expect to be grounded, perhaps even spanked. They’d be skulking home with a crop of C’s and D’s.

Those grades reflect the thousands of wild places whose vitality is being compromised by an overall lack of active intervention. “If your child came home with a report card like this, you’d do something about it,” said Karen Glennemeier of Audubon–Chicago Region, one of the report’s compilers.”You’d turn off the TV and get serious.”

“That is our greatest challenge. We have to do a better job of helping people understand why these places are important....It’s not just about plants and animals. Those natural areas also provide wonderful recreational opportunities and play a valuable role in cleaning the air and our water.”

— Bruce Boyd, The Nature Conservancy

The report card assigned grades to a range of ecosystem types and animal groups. The grades are a snapshot of each classification, showing where each ranks along a spectrum of biodiversity quality. An “A” or “excellent” grade indicates stable, high-quality communities with much biodiversity. “B” or “good” means stable communities with much biodiversity, though not all of high quality. Unfortunately, none of the categories received either of those.

Wooded lands scored a D+. That’s a “poor” grade, indicating rapid biodiversity loss, or a general lack of biological quality. Our wooded lands may appear green to the average observer, but they’re a sickly green, increasingly made up of invasive species such as buckthorn, box elder, and garlic mustard. When such bullies are around, true nature disappears.

Prairies received a D. Chicago Wilderness is famous for some shining examples of remnant tallgrass prairie. But most of our grasslands are former agricultural land, unrestored, and rapidly “brushing in” — a lot of potential, but little biodiversity.

In the face of increased development that pollutes water and alters its flow, our wetlands scored a D+. It didn’t help that they’ve got their own invasive species to deal with, including purple loosestrife, reed canary grass, and brush of various kinds.

Streams and lakes did slightly better, with a C­ and a C, respectively. But that’s only because of a handful of pristine waterways that development hasn’t reached yet. In the report card’s system, a “C” or “fair” indicates either a moderate amount of biodiversity remaining, or quite a bit of biodiversity that’s declining.

Okay. So far, not so good. Sad, anxious, depressed? Don’t be, say the report card compilers. It’s a big step forward to know where we stand. If we recognize the problem, we can do something about it. Also on the bright side: In recent years, landowners have added more than 20,000 acres to preserves and conservation districts. And although no overall natural community type scored an A or a B, the report card does highlight individual places that are maintaining their richness. At the head of the class are preserves such as Bluff Spring Fen, Middlefork Savanna near Lake Forest, the restored Nippersink Creek in McHenry County, and Chiwaukee Prairie in Wisconsin near the Illinois border. These serve as examples of how vigor can be restored if there is the wherewithal and will to make it happen. On a regional scale, it’s a matter of increasing the quantity of intensive conservation work being done, says Glennemeier. “We know what to do, and we’re doing it. We just need to do more of it.”

Rating the Animals

The major groups of animals that the report card evaluated fared only slightly better than the ecosystems. In most cases, their poor grades reflected the diminishing quality of the habitats in which they live (or fail to live).

Even with exciting improvements such as sandhill and whooping cranes on the comeback, and those spectacular warbler migrations twice a year, birds scored a C­. Blame it on the small and struggling populations of grassland birds — bobolinks, meadowlarks, and Henslow’s sparrows. While many groups of species are improving, grassland and shrubland birds are still teetering on the edge without enough open habitat in which to live and breed.

Report card compilers gave a C­ to reptiles and amphibians, which are declining regionwide. Hemmed in to diminishing natural areas, turtles, salamanders, and frogs risk mass deaths crossing roads to make their small migrations for breeding. Pollution is also a factor for the thin-skinned amphibians.

Although mosquitoes seem to be doing just fine (if their attendance at picnics is any indication), Chicago Wilderness rated the ecological health of conservative insect populations at C­. “Of our region’s 5,000 to 6,000 insect species,” the report explained, “as many as 1,000 species are considered ’conservative,’ meaning they require high-quality habitat to survive and are therefore of conservation concern.” It’s these bugs — which include butterflies, dragonflies, and so many others — that are at considerable risk. Some species survive in our region at just a few preserves, some no larger than a few acres.

Lowest, but not least in the animal kingdom, the fish of Chicago Wilderness received a D+. If a river gets polluted, becomes silty, or gets dammed, sensitive fish disappear. According to the report, no fish community is improving, although some appear to be stable.

Attitude Improvement

Though the report card gave no grades in this category, it noted a general upturn in positive attitudes toward nature conservation by the public, often expressed with tangible support. In the last decade, voters have approved two dozen referenda, generating more than $540 million available for conservation initiatives. Thousands of volunteers provide more than 66,000 hours annually of donated labor valued at more than $1 million. And the number of municipal ordinances encouraging sustainable development has increased.

If new policies that promote healthy natural communities are to be enacted throughout the region, widespread public support, including that generated by increased nature education in schools, is crucial. “That is our greatest challenge,” said Bruce Boyd, executive director of the Illinois Nature Conservancy. “We have to do a better job of helping people understand why these places are important for all of us and the various functions of these natural communities. It’s not just about plants and animals. Those natural areas also provide wonderful recreational opportunities and play a valuable role in cleaning the air and our water.”

Turning Nature Into Numbers

The report card is a big step toward more standardized testing and accountability, a kind of “No Preserve Left Behind” program. Fortunately for natural areas, such improved quantitative measures will also help provide land managers with better tools and funds to give preserves the specialized, qualitative, one-on-one attention they need.

“We are doing a lot of work collectively in Chicago Wilderness to restore lands, but we have to be able to measure progress,” said John Rogner, field supervisor of the Chicago regional office of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which participated in the study. “This report gives us a baseline condition of the ecological status of the land.”

The compilers of the report card were charged with determining the ecological quality of 250,000 acres, an area comparable to 32 O’Hare Airports but scattered in thousands of fragments from southeast Wisconsin to northwest Indiana. They found that the records needed to precisely analyze the condition of the whole organism known as Chicago Wilderness were either nonexistent or incompatible from one agency to another. “There’s a lot of systematic and scientific monitoring,” Rogner said, “but much of it is very uneven in its coverage of species and communities.”

That meant the compilers made use of the best data available. One early attempt to characterize the lands on a broad scale, conducted by the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County in the 1990s, determined the average land quality as “poor.” As a result, that district dramatically increased its staffing and budget for land management. Friends of the Forest Preserves, Audubon, and the Sierra Club subsequently organized a similar study, of more than twice as much land,for Cook County. (Both studies made use of trained volunteers and professional botanists.) When the Cook County Forest Preserve Board learned that 57 percent of its woodlands and 71 percent of its wetlands were in poor condition, and that, system-wide, 68 percent of the natural lands deserved a “D,” the board increased the land management budget and created a new Department of Resource Management to turn the preserves around.

The first study to examine the entire region in this much detail was the Chicago Wilderness Woods Audit, conducted in 2001. It determined that unmanaged bur oak woods were being lost the fastest, followed by the white oak woods.

Most ecosystem types have not been the subjects of a comprehensive regional study like the Woods Audit, but a wide variety of studies have been conducted over the years by forest preserve districts, the Illinois Natural History Survey, and other agencies. For this report card, Chicago Wilderness sought out, consulted, and brought together in workshops the people who created those earlier studies to judge data and extrapolate it to determine the current regional grades.

The report card challenges scientists to create a regional repository of data on each of the natural communities and species assemblages in Chicago Wilderness. Agencies must agree on a common language and protocol for collecting and reporting data on plants and animals. Getting these scientists to do all this sharing is expected to be arduous (perhaps only slightly easier than getting our national security agencies to share intelligence). Even so, the Illinois Natural History Survey has begun to survey Chicago Wilderness members on how information is collected and recorded. The agency’s end goal is to establish a regionwide data collection system that makes the best use of staff and volunteer resources.

Such a clearinghouse will be invaluable in further specifying conservation priorities and setting measurable goals, say compilers. They also expect it to be a powerful resource in conveying to funders and the public not only the easily visible local successes but the entire scope of the regional restoration challenge.

Improving the Grades

Participants hope this report card will be the first of many. Despite the seemingly dire prognosis, a large part of Chicago Wilderness has the ability to return to wholeness. The network of remnant prairies, woodlands, and wetlands that have blossomed under the ministrations of land managers is an “ark” of sorts, a collection of every kind of functioning ecological community that existed in the region. From these places, degraded lands — our unfortunate C’s and D’s — can be restored.

Active management, say report card compilers, will restore our biodiversity and earn natural areas better grades. The report prescribes more invasive species control, control of problem animals such as deer, and other active management including the use of controlled burns.

New land acquisitions — especially in key areas where sprawl is rampant — are also critical. “But relying on acquisition alone is like when a community builds a school and then fails to provide enough funds for good teachers and books,” said Rogner. “The administrators can say the kids are getting an education, but really they’re languishing.” And it is not practical, say compilers, to expect taxing bodies such as forest preserve and park districts to pay for everything. Developers, private landowners, and municipalities must become partners.

The report urges governments to enact stronger development ordinances that protect natural communities and open space, just as laws regulate transportation needs and infrastructure.

Chicago Wilderness says it will issue another report card in five to ten years. What will the region’s natural areas look like by then? Will we be paying more attention to our last wild places? Can Chicago Wilderness reach a balance between the built and natural environment?

“It depends on whether you are an optimist or pessimist,” Rogner said. “I do say it is achievable but can’t say when. The important thing is to strive and not go backward.”

“Our children and grandchildren are going to thank us,” Glennemeier said, “for taking this challenge head-on.”

Contributors to this article include contributing editor LeAnn Spencer, the editors of Chicago WILDERNESS, and the staff of the Chicago Wilderness consortium.

Related Articles

People Who Are Taking Nature’s Pulse, CW, Winter 2004

The Chicago Wilderness Plan, CW, Spring 2000