Cincinnati Re-Wild - Backyard Ecological Restoration Umbrella's Journal

Typically small, privately owned, natural areas that are intended to complement larger, ecosystem level preserves.

What's the point?
Micro-preserves of all sizes, existing on patchworks of privately owned land, might help support and sustain organisms moving between larger ecosystem level protected areas.

Are they all the same?
Nope.

What do they have in common?
They aren't pavement and they aren't lawn grass. At the very least, they each seek to protect areas that are natural and they exist on a spectrum from pure naturalism to aggressively assisted regeneration. Sometimes including planned prairie and in the most confined of spaces... cultivated beds or containers with ecologically desirable plants.

How are they different?
A micro-preserve with a management strategy of "pure naturalism" will likely host different organisms from a preserve with a strategy of aggressive "assisted regeneration". And both of these will host different organisms than a planned prairie. All strategies are welcome in the umbrella so long as the project owner is committed to limiting pavement and sod in the area being managed as a micro-preserve.

Why group these micro-preserves under an umbrella?
There are several reasons. Here are some...

• So the owners can find each other and follow along with what is working and what isn't within the group.
• So that a 20 something moving from a condo to a first home might be able to find a neighborhood with at least one neighbor committed to ecological restoration and/or naturalism.
  
• So that differing strategies within the group can be compared to one another.
• To influence and/or support others interested in starting similar projects.
• To support the concept of a collective blog sharing information with a wider audience of people with similar intent.

Are these natural, ecologically restored areas allowed to be pretty?
Yes. Pretty and natural are not mutually exclusive. Assisted regeneration allows for careful selection of ecologically appropriate plants that fit themselves into the ecosystem but also fit themselves into residential neighborhoods. If your assisted regeneration strategy calls for the removal of honeysuckle, you do get to decide what (if anything) to plant in its place. The more artistic among us might demonstrate how a species perceived to be graceless, might appear graceful when planted alongside plants that complement its unique growth form.
Example - One of the projects within the umbrella has found a way to make Pokeberry look beautiful when planted among other tall forbs. It is so beautiful that it is pictured prominently, framing the right side of the banner photo for their project.

My Kentucky Yard captures attention with intelligent, concise, and thoughtful observation “notes”. It’s nice when project managers add a couple sentences of “notes” along with the scientific data. Sometimes the feeling they have, while capturing the data, might itself be part of that data. This owner appears to have thought about these notes finding their way toward a distant future where anthropologists might better understand what we were interested in while conducting the observations. What we were thinking and feeling about individual species but also about the collection of species our properties support.

The project manager responds...

I'm pleased that you like my notes. From a field botanist's perspective, most iNat observations could be improved if people added notes. Without them, so much useful information is lost. When you collect a plant specimen, really good ones include notes in addition to who/what/when/where. It’s best to include useful data that won't be obvious from just the specimen, like habitat information, how common the species was, associated organisms, etc. I include other information with my iNat observations because I hope to use them for examples when teaching, and just because I enjoy writing about nature.

The umbrella project is looking good. I've already enjoyed virtually visiting the other properties.