wish I could go to this event on moss

Moss likes your garden! Why you might consider taking its side     Monday, March 17, 2014, 7:30 p.m.sharp Jennifer Doubt, Chief Collections Manager, Botany Section at the Canadian Museum of Nature, will share with us what moss is and how it fits in the plant world. Presented by the Gloucester Horticultural Society, 4373 Generation Court. Pre-registration recommended at (613) 749-8897. Free Admission.

For more information: Contact Name: Fleurette Huneault Website: http://www.gardenontario.org/site.php.glouster Phone: 613-749-8897 E-mail: gloucester (at) gardenontario.org

Glebe Trees

Somehow I came across this resource - what a find: Glebe Trees.  It helps identify the trees along each street and also provides a spring log that was created in 2009 documenting the changes in the trees from March until the end of April.  You can peruse a nice long list of all the species of trees found in the Glebe and it even has an identification key using size, flowers, leaves, bark, form and season.  Brilliant!

It also provides a link to the Environment Committee of the Glebe Community Association which was running a project to document the health of Glebe trees with the help of volunteers called "Re-TREE Our Glebe":

Tree Inventory

The project to inventory trees on City rights-of-way led by Carol MacLeod was stymied by technical data entry problems in 2010, but is hoping to continue the project in 2011. Volunteers are always needed.

Not sure if the project is still ongoing.

What about planting more native trees as per Diana Beresford-Kroeger?

when Nature and Numbers don't meet

What a great topic!  Someone emailed me a link to this symposium.

Information from the website:

The Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies will host a three-day symposium on the intersections and tensions between sensory or emotive experiences of nature and the bureaucratic, political, and scientific quantification of the environment.  

We are especially interested in reflexive moments when numbers become lived experience; moments of cooptation when quantification appropriates the language of experience; and moments of resistance when the mismatch between experience and quantification overwhelms the discussion.  Potential research questions include:

• How is nature defined and valued, and for or by whom?
• How have sensory and emotive experiences of the environment been translated into numerical or monetary terms, and are there examples of the reverse phenomenon?
• When and why have environmentalists adopted numbers or monetary values for conservation ends, and what are the trade-offs of this approach compared to, for example, arguments for the intrinsic value(s) of nature?
• Who has determined the correspondence between qualitative and quantitative measures of value?  How?  To what end?
• How have the values societies ascribe to nature changed over time, how are social and political conflicts over these values adjudicated, and what has been the role of scientific expertise?

 Link to Event


Symposium organizers:
Kristoffer Whitney, Postdoctoral Fellow, Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies
Melanie Kiechle, Assistant Professor of History, Virginia Tech.

Wildlife Education in Toronto Parkette

New Partnership Will Green Toronto Parks 

"An example of a project that received funding in the first year of this program is the Ritchie Parkette. With a $25,000 grant, The Rotary Club of Toronto, the Friends of Ritchie Parkette and the Toronto Department of Parks, Forestry & Recreation will rehabilitate the parkette’s natural environment, introduce wildlife education and programming."

All details here: Ontario Trillium Foundation

More details were available on the Friends of Ritchie Parkette Blog:

It was announced yesterday that the W. Garfield Weston Foundation will support improvements to Ritchie Parkette with a $25,000 grant provided through the Weston Family Parks Challenge.  

The Rotary Club of Toronto, the Friends of Ritchie Parkette and the Toronto Department of Parks, Forestry & Recreation will use the grant to rehabilitate the parkette’s natural environment, introduce wildlife education and programming. 
We are approved for the following: 

•  Native species will be planted at the front of the park and some interpretive signage that identifies the plants and describes healthy natural habitats. 

• A chalk board wildlife and bird sighting display and some signage about birds in the area will be erected with links for posting bird, insect and mammal sightings to this blog. 

• Access to a water tap for all seasons. 

This means sandcastles, rivers through sand tunnels and water for the ice rink in the winter.  

Thanks to all involved for their time in helping us win this generous grant.

All images from Friends of Ritchie Parkette Blog (Owl visited their park in November 2012!)



Other Urban Bird Posts:

- Urban Bobolink in Ottawa (2012)

- The Pigeon Paradox (2012)

- Urban Chimney Swift Towers (2011)

- Purple Martin Nesting (2011)

- Roosting Crows in Ottawa (2011)

Suburb Re-Do

Images: Sherwood Eng, Washington Edu, Seattle PI, Mithūn Arch.

From Ecobuilding Pulse:

"Revitalizing and rethinking suburban developments offers a wealth of opportunities to builders and architects, says Ellen Dunham-Jones, who is overseeing Sustainable Communities for the Hanley Wood Sustainability Council.

A lot of your work focuses on the suburbs. What are the opportunities there?

The opportunity is that we get a do-over. We built so much, but no one was thinking about environmental issues, especially when it came to the immediate postwar buildings. We drained wetlands. We built with excess. Now that so many of those properties are failing or underperforming, we have a great opportunity to redevelop them into more mixed-use, urban places, or to regreen spaces where we never should have built in the first place.

What do you mean by “regreen” them?

In some cases, especially if there is a slow market, it makes the most sense to simply tear a building down and replace it with a park. Sometimes it means reconstructing wetlands or daylighting creeks that had been put into culverts under parking lots, or putting in community gardens. Outside of Minneapolis in the low-income suburb of Phalen, there was a big strip mall built in the 1960s. It was built before the Clean Water Act, when it was perfectly normal to drain wetlands and put a culvert under the parking lot. The site also happened to be on a major migratory route. Well, the strip mall died and so did the culvert. People at the University of Minnesota’s landscape program made a case for reconstructing the wetlands. They built a beautiful lake and created lakefront property that attracted the first new private investment in over 40 years, which also happens to be next to a big public housing development. This helped trigger improvements to the public housing. The dead strip mall was bringing property values down. So, regreening the space served multiple purposes.

Another thing that’s happening is the daylighting of creeks. One of the most dramatic examples is the Northgate Mall in Seattle. The project has received a lot of press because it features new housing and senior housing on the sides of Thornton Creek, which used to be a culvert under the mall’s parking lot. Now it’s an amenity for housing, the headwaters of a major stream, and can handle the area’s flooding."         (Image: Lisatown - Inspirational Wall)

From Ecobuildingpulse.com By Katie Weeks