Plants of the Chicago Wilderness: Stories from Home and Field

Thursday, May 7th, 2020
6PM – 7:30PM

Join us for a virtual happy hour and get a glimpse into some unique plants and habitats of the Chicago Wilderness region through the lens of ecological restoration practitioners. Learn how plants can help recreate lost ecosystems, create entirely new ones, and help us read the landscape to learn how to bring nature back to one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world.

Register: https://audubon.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUqce6trz0vGN2eRwGLqwczNlUc_hrdf5PU

Speakers:
🌻 Robb Telfer is an amateur naturalist and performance poet from Chicago. He has taught and performed in nine different countries and his writing has appeared in video games, public radio, newspapers, and magazines. 

🌻 cassi saari is a recent addition to the Chicago Park District’s natural areas team where she coordinates research and monitoring and supports on-the-ground ecological restoration through mapping and planning. Her background is in field botany, ecological restoration design, and vegetation monitoring. She is a volunteer Curator on iNaturalist.org and President of the Northeast Chapter of the Illinois Native Plant Society.

🌻 Kevin Scheiwiller is the Restoration Manager for Citizens for Conservation, a local non-profit that focuses on restoring their land holdings while sharing resources with local forest preserve districts to expand the restoration footprint in the Barrington area.

🌻 Travis Kuntzelman is the Indian Boundary Prairies (IBP) Stewardship Manager. He restores remnant grasslands in the Lake Plain and Calumet region. IBP is located in Markham, IL and includes 5 Nature Preserves.

🌻 Lauren Umek is a Project Manager with the Chicago Park District where she became fascinated with the ecological potential of post-industrial landscapes. Her PhD research explored the impacts of land management on plants and soils but the ecosystems in the Calumet region seem to challenge existing ecological knowledge in an amazing way.

🌻 Daniel Suarez is the Stewardship Program Manager for Audubon Great Lakes, where he works to recruit, empower, and connect volunteer stewards throughout the region. He works with landowners, scientists, and monitors to understand the impacts of land management on birds through co-chairing the Chicago Wilderness Grassland Bird Task Force.

hope to see you there!
—cassi

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