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Increasingly people are moving from rural to urban areas which is broadening and expanding the footprint of our cities. The year 2008 marked the first time in human history that the majority of people lived in urban places. Over 1.5 million people are added to our population each week, and the majority of this growth is absorbed into cities. This great urban migration has two major consequences for natural communities. First, the strain that people place on natural resources is increasingly concentrated in and around urbanized centers. Second, for the majority of humans worldwide, the city has become the primary context for interacting with and experiencing nature and wildlife.
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Our CitiesOur cities are placing unprecedented demands on natural resources while simultaneously serving as humankind’s primary access point to nature. Despite this accelerating pace of urbanization and its consequences for both natural systems and human perceptions of nature, the discipline that studies these issues – urban ecology – is a relatively undeveloped branch of science. As a result, nearly all ecological theory regarding wildlife communities has been established in wild, rural, or non-urbanized contexts. This means that we know very little about urban wildlife ecology and even less about the best practices for conservation and the human-nature connection in the context of cities.
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OUr Solution Focus on Wildlife is a large-scale, multidisciplinary, long-term urban ecology project in Cleveland, Ohio. With Cleveland Metroparks we seek to quantify the mechanisms shaping the distribution and abundance of wildlife throughout the park system. We are testing some of the fundamental hypotheses of ecology in an extensive urban ecosystem to see if theories derived in the wild hold true in urban settings. We are also examining how human perception of the parks relates to their ecological characteristics so that we can improve our education and outreach strategies for connecting people with nature in the city.
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OUr MethodsThe Cleveland Metroparks is an astounding and unique urban ecosystem, perfectly suited to study wildlife community ecology and human-nature interactions in an urban context. The Metroparks are composed of 18 parks with over 23,000 acres of natural habitat, including rolling rivers, breath-taking waterfalls, and miles and miles of forest. Deer, coyote, fox, raccoon, and many other mammals call the Metroparks their home. The parks are also a haven for hundreds of bird species, host amazing plant diversity, and serve as a destination for millions park visitors seeking to connect with nature.
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REsearch Approach
In close partnership with our Metroparks collaborators, we have deployed hundreds of wildlife cameras throughout this system in an effort to study this ecosystem without disturbing it. We have paired each of these cameras with a long-term vegetation monitoring plot, which will enable us to model human-wildlife-vegetation relationships with an unprecedented level of detail at multiple scales.
Citizen Science and Underrepresented Groups
We are enthusiastic about involving both the public and groups traditionally underrepresented in the natural sciences in this project. Many of our sites in the Metroparks are maintained by dedicated volunteers and we are developing a Zooniverse citizen science project so that anyone with a computer and an interest in urban wildlife can take part in Focus on Wildlife. Conducting research in the city affords access to a diversity of students, citizens, and researchers. We are promoting diversity via various avenues, such as mentorship of high school interns through the Multicultural Apprenticeship Program at Michigan State University.
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