With the push to protect farmland and other natural areas from development, as evidenced by the growth of
Ann Arbor's Greenbelt and
Washtenaw County's Natural Areas Preservation program, the question is, how to pinpoint the best properties for saving? The Huron River Watershed Council's (HRWC) Bioreserve project was expressly designed to assist local conservancies and governments tasked with combing through untold thousands of acres to find the proverbial diamond in the rough.
"The purpose of the Bioreserve project is to assess and protect the remaining natural areas in the watershed," says Kris Olsson, watershed ecologist for the HRWC. The
HRWC is putting two recent grants, $60,000 from the Carls Foundation and $5,000 from the Consumers Energy Foundation, to that end.
The effort, which began in 2000, used computer modeling based on aerial photos to create a bioreserve map that depicts and ranks natural areas in the Huron River watershed and ranks them on quality factors such as vegetation type and geology. The HRWC also developed a rapid field assessment methodology to be conducted at ground level.
"We wanted to get a closer look, and so we've been doing field assessments on selected properties from that map for the last three years," Olsson explains. "And so we have a great deal of data now on over 600 different ecosystems throughout the [seven-county] watershed." The HRWC shares this data with entities including Washtenaw County, Ann Arbor's Greenbelt, the Huron-Clinton Metropolitan Authority, and the Southeast Michigan, Legacy, Livingston, North Oakland Headwaters, and Six Rivers Regional land conservancies.
Use of the bioreserve assessment data has enabled a couple of land conservation deals in Washtenaw County, according to Olsson. Thus far, the Clark property, a hilly natural area in Sharon Township, has been preserved. And the Legacy Land Conservancy is working on another deal for which specifics aren't available as the deal is pending, Olsson says, but a closing is anticipated by year-end.
Source: Kris Olsson, watershed ecologist, Huron River Watershed Council
Writer: Tanya Muzumdar
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