Tags: ecology

The New York City Urban Field Station is a brand new office, laboratory and residence for visiting and resident urban ecology research activities and researchers, located in Fort Totten Park in Bayside, Queens.  The facility is a physical base for The New York City Urban Field Station program, launched in 2006 by the Parks Department and the U.S.

MillionTreesNYC is seeking volunteers to help plant 20,000 trees at parks throughout the five boroughs this Saturday, October 23rd.  Spots are still available at two sites on Staten Island, Clove Lakes Park and Wolfe’s Pond Park, as well as at Ferry Point Park in the Bronx. 

Sneak Peak was a huge success!  About 1800 people joined us at the Freshkills Park site on Sunday to make and fly kites, canoe in the creeks, walk the site with an expert, ride a pony, pet a goat, make a bag or a birdhouse, learn about composting and recycling and energy efficiency, receive a free bike helmet or fitting, enjoy the fun music, cool crafts and awesome food and generally celebrate the potential of this fascinating and amazing site. 

One of the things we’ve learned over the course of this park project is that the Freshkills Park site has been a part of many, many people’s careers: Sanitation workers, engineers, equipment manufacturers, scientists, policymakers, designers, artists, philanthropists—we are constantly astonished to discover a new realm of expertise on this site with which we’re so familiar. 

New York Magazine runs a great feature on the ecological diversity of New York City.  Not only does it recap the higher profile wildlife sightings throughout the City—coyotes on Manhattan’s west side, wild turkeys on Staten Island—but also makes larger points about the depth and rarity of many of the City’s ecological resources, not just in spite of urban development, but in some cases, because of it.

We’ve been hard at work putting together the first open, public event EVER at the Freshkills Park site, which will take place Sunday, October 3rd!  ‘Sneak Peak at Freshkills Park‘ will not only be a chance to see the site’s hills and wetlands in all their autumn glory, it will also be a hybrid kite festival/street fair/series of special site tours! 

The Farm City Fair is a festival taking place over three weekends at various Brooklyn sites to celebrate and build knowledge about current practices in urban agriculture.  Farmers, artists and urban planners will be on hand to discuss and present rooftop farm projects, urban homesteading, city beekeeping, parking lot agriculture and more. 

The American Society of Landscape Architects has put together an online exhibition called Designing Our Future: Sustainable Landscapes.

[The exhibition] highlights real-life examples of sustainable landscape design and its positive effects on the environment and quality of life. These spaces use natural systems to clean the air and water, restore habitats, create healthy communities, and ultimately provide significant economic, social, and environmental value.

Expedition Gowanus is a series of Saturday workshops focused on low-tech, do-it-yourself sustainability practices happening in tandem with an informing the self-sustainable redesign and retrofitting of a houseboat in Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.  The first workshop will be held Saturday, September 11th and will focus on phytoremediation, the use of plants to draw pollutants out of the surrounding environment. 

The new exhibit at Wave Hill in the Bronx, called Remediate/Re-vision: Public Artists Engaging the Environment, opened on Sunday.  It showcases remediation- or sustainability-based public art projects since 2002 that have either been completed or are in the planning stages for parks and gardens. 

Spectacle Island, part of the Boston Harbor National Recreation Area, was home to a horse rendering plant and a city waste incinerator from 1857 to 1937.  When the incinerator closed, the island served as a landfill until 1959.  Though the island’s original size was approximately 49 acres, landfilling increased its size to 85 acres (with an additional 28 acres in the intertidal zone). 

Artist Tattfoo Tan will lead bike tour of Staten Island community gardens this Saturday, July 24th, hitting Castleton Hill Moravian Church community garden and the Joe Holzka Community Garden. Attendees are encouraged to wear a helmet and bring plenty of water. 

We just dug up this great story from the New York Times in 2000 that features the work of Rutgers restoration ecologist Steven Handel at the Freshkills Park site.  Dr. Handel and his students had completed a 16-acre study at the old landfill in the New Jersey Meadowlands when they entered into agreement with the NYC Department of Sanitation to study the rehabilitation of native ecology at the not-yet-closed Fresh Kills Landfill. 

Thanks to all who joined our field trip last Friday, and especially to Tim and Heather at the Greenbelt Native Plant Center for so graciously guiding us through all that the Center does.  They gave us a history of the site (which was formerly the Mohlenoff family farm, itself a storied place) and its operations, explained their Foundation Seed production, soil preparation, seed cleaning, storage and banking, as well as greenhouse operations. 

Pressured by the FDA to provide more vigilant oversight and worried that poachers may sell oysters from polluted coastal waters to consumers, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection has halted its oyster bed restoration projects.  This, despite the fact that oyster beds are being deliberately restored to tainted bodies of water throughout the region to rid them of pollutants.

We’re taking another field trip!  The afternoon of Friday, June 25th, members of the Freshkills Park development team will be taking a guided tour of the Park Department’s Greenbelt Native Plant Center (GNPC) on Staten Island.  And you’re invited.

The GNPC is a 13-acre greenhouse, nursery and seed-bank complex specializing in the collection, cultivation and production of native plant material for the use of habitat restoration within New York City.

Tomorrow evening, Dr. Judith S. Weis, Professor of Biological Sciences at Rutgers University will be talking about and signing copies of her book Salt Marshes: A Natural and Unnatural History at the Greenbelt Nature Center on Staten Island.  The book is first a history of American salt marshes, their ecological functions, gradual destruction and several profiles of contemporary restoration projects. 

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/4417679]

The second annual New York City Wildflower Week actually runs for nine days, starting tomorrow, May 1st and running through the end of next weekend.  The various cultural partners involved in organizing Wildflower Week are offering a host of (mostly) free programs all over the City to encourage New Yorkers to learn about, experience and reflect on the sustainability of native plants, particularly. 

The New York Times features a long-term partnership between the National Park Service and the US Army Corps of Engineers to restore the rapidly disappearing salt marsh islands in Jamaica Bay, the 26-square-mile lagoon bordered by Brooklyn and Queens. Now comprising 800 acres altogether, the series of islands in the Bay spanned more than 16,000 acres a century ago.

If you’re not a biologist or a wildlife hobbyist, it can be hard to understand what the big deal is about birds, bats and other creatures at the Freshkills Park site—why are our birding tours always booked months in advance?  Why so much concern—huge sections of environmental review documents, regulatory review on issues of habitat fragmentation—for the welfare of populations of small animals, when the site is so big?